
,0* .•"•• *o 




SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 



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SOCIAL 
LIFE IN ENGLAND 

1750-1850 



BY 

F. J. FOAKES JACKSON 



Nefo garfe 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

1916 

All rights reserved 



11 A S3 3 



Copyright, 1916, 
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 

Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1916. 



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ACADEMIAE HARVARDIANAE 
ET PRAESERTIM 

A. LAURENTIO LOWELL 

PRAESIDI 

PROFESSORSIBUSQUE EIS 

QUI FRATERNO AMORE 

HOSPITEM ACCEPERUNT 

CANTABRIGIENSIS CANTABRIGIENSIBUS 

HOC OPUSCULUM 

D.D. 



PREFACE 

This volume contains a course of Lowell 
Lectures delivered in Boston in March, 19 16; 
and I take this opportunity of tending my thanks 
to the Lowell Institute for affording me the 
privilege of delivering them. I must also thank 
a most indulgent audience for their sympathetic 
attention. 

I desire particularly to thank several friends in 
England for assistance in the preparation of these 
lectures. In my investigations into the story 
of Margaret Catchpole, Mr. John Cobbold of 
Holywells, Ipswich, Mr. Edward Brooke of 
Ufford Hall, Suffolk, Mrs. Sylvester of Ton- 
bridge, and the Curator of the Ipswich Museum, 
allowed me to see original documents of great 
interest ; Mr. Barker of the East Anglian Daily 
Times and Mr. Goodwin of Ipswich helped by 
searching the files of old newspapers for infor- 
mation. The Downing Professor of the Laws 



viii PREFACE 

of England at Cambridge assisted with his ad- 
vice on the subject of Dickens' legal knowledge ; 
and Mr. Stoakley of the Cambridge chemical labo- 
ratory contributed to the success of the lectures 
by his admirable reproductions of illustrative 
maps and pictures. 

Above all, I must express my gratitude to two 
ladies in America, who not only contributed 
to the pleasure of my visit by their unstinted 
hospitality, but did all in their power to save me 
from those pitfalls which beset every one who 
lectures in a strange country. Mrs. Barrett 
Wendell of Boston found time in the midst of 
her many useful avocations to hear several lectures 
before they were delivered, and to advise how they 
could be made more intelligible and acceptable 
to an American audience; and Mrs. Kirsopp 
Lake proved herself indefatigable not only in re- 
vising the lectures before they were delivered, but 
also in reading the proofs of this book. 

Union Theological Seminary, 
New York, 

August, 19 1 6. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 

LECTURE PAGE 

I. Life in the Eighteenth Century Illustrated 

by the Career of John Wesley . . i 

II. George Crabbe ...... 42 

III. Margaret Catchpole . . . .81 

IV. Gunning's "Reminiscences of Cambridge" . 126 
V. Creevey Papers — The Regency. . . 168 

VI. Social Abuses as Exposed by Charles Dickens 213 

VII. Mid-Victorianism. W. M. Thackeray . 261 

VIII. Sport, and Rural England . . .302 



SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

LECTURE I 

Life in the Eighteenth Century Illus- 
trated by the Career of John Wesley 

In order to depict social life in England in 
the eighteenth century I am going to take 
the career of one of its most remarkable men, 
though you may be surprised at the choice 
I have made. For the eighteenth century 
was an eminently social age and the stage 
is crowded with figures of men and women of 
the world. Their letters, their talk, their 
scandals, their amusements have come down 
to us in profusion ; and it is not difficult for 
us to imagine ourselves in their midst. You 
may well ask me why I did not select a really 
brilliant character to expound the life of this 
time. I might for example have taken Lord 
Chesterfield or Horace Walpole, or Boswell, 



2 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

that most observant of men, or the great char- 
acter whom he immortalised. Or I might have 
selected others less known, but equally inter- 
esting, and rather than a revivalist preacher 
like John Wesley. I had written thus far 
when I came across the following words by 
the British man of letters, Mr. Birrell : 

"How much easier to weave into your 
page the gossip of Horace Walpole, to enliven 
it with a heartless jest of George Selwyn, to 
make it blush with the sad stories of the 
extravagance of Fox, to embroider it with 
the rhetoric of Burke, to humanise it with 
the talk of Johnson, to discuss the rise and 
fall of administrations, the growth and decay 
of the constitution, than to follow John 
Wesley into the streets of Bristol, or to the 
bleak moors near Burslem, when he met 
face to face in all their violence, all their 
ignorance, and all their generosity the living 
men, women, and children, who made up the 
nation." 



LECTURE I 3 

But I think I could give another reason why- 
John Wesley is a fit person to represent the 
social life of his century, namely, that though 
he may undoubtedly be classed among the 
saints, though he was one of the most 
unworldly of men, though he took what must 
seem to most of us an unnecessarily serious 
view of life, he fell short of hardly any of the 
great men enumerated in shrewd observation 
and even in what in the language of his time 
would have been termed " wit." Nay, Wes- 
ley possessed a caustic humour which many 
a worldly wit might have envied. "Cer- 
tainly," he writes in Scotland, "this is a nation 
quick to hear and slow to speak, though 
certainly not * slow to wrath/" "You can- 
not be too superficial in addressing a ' polite ' 
audience " is an aphorism of his which I re- 
member. "I know mankind too well, I 
know they that love you for political service, 
love you less than their dinner ; and they 
that hate you, hate you worse than the 



4 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

devil. " Here is a criticism of a tapestry in 
Dublin. "In Jacob's vision you see, on the 
one side a little paltry ladder, and an angel 
climbing up it in the attitude of a chimney 
sweeper ; and on the other side — Jacob 
staring at him under a silver laced hat." 
The criticisms of books, — for he was an om- 
nivorous reader, especially on a journey, — 
"History, poetry and philosophy I commonly 
read on horseback, having other employment 
at other times," — are not always fair but 
nearly always shrewd and often as bitter as 
anything Johnson himself could have uttered. 
"I read with much expectation a celebrated 
book, Rousseau on Education. But how was 
I disappointed ! Sure a more consummate 
coxcomb never saw the sun ... I object to 
his temper even more than to his judgment : 
he is a mere misanthrope ; a cynic all over. 
So indeed is his brother infidel Voltaire ; and 
well nigh as great a coxcomb. But he hides 
his doggedness and vanity a little better ; 



LECTURE I 5 

whereas here it stares us in the face continu- 
ally." Here is his opinion of a very famous 
book. "Tuesday, February 1 1, 1772, I casu- 
ally took a volume of what is called, A senti- 
mental Journey through France and Italy. 
Sentimental ! What is that ? It is not Eng- 
lish : he might as well say Continental. It is 
not sense. It conveys no determinate idea : 
yet one fool makes many. And this non- 
sensical word (who would believe it ?) is be- 
come a fashionable one ! However the book 
agrees full well with the title ; for one is as 
queer as the other. For oddity, uncouthness, 
and unlikeness to all the world beside, I 
suppose the writer is without a rival." "A 
book wrote with as much learning and as 
little judgment, as any I remember to have 
read in my whole life," he says of Cave's 
" Primitive Christianity." Despite the fact, 
therefore, that John Wesley was devoted to the 
work of missionary preaching, that he was 
an ecstatic visionary and in many respects 



6 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

the most credulous as well as the most zealous 
of evangelists, his knowledge of men and 
critical power was not a little remarkable. 
I am not at all sure that sinners are not the 
right people to write about saints. Saints 
may be ; because sanctity implies something 
attractive which is almost unthinkable with- 
out the sympathy which nearly always reveals 
itself in a certain playfulness. But good, 
deserving people are assuredly not qualified 
to be the biographers of saints ; for, in their 
desire to exalt their hero, they generally 
strip him of all the qualities for which men 
loved him (and no one was ever loved for his 
perfections alone) and present him as their 
own ideal of what a saint should be. John 
Wesley is an example of this and he would 
appear in a far more amiable light in pages 
written by a kindly man of the world than 
in a book by a devoted admirer and would- 
be imitator of his virtues. It was, after 
all, Boswell's many failings which contrib- 



LECTURE I 7 

uted to give us so delightful a portrait 
as that of his great and good friend, Samuel 
Johnson. 

Now John Wesley was an undoubted saint, 
and the good he did in England, and his 
society in America for that matter, is incal- 
culable : but I ask his admirers and any who 
profess to follow him to forgive me for using 
him as a peg on which to hang a few remarks 
on social England. Before, however, I do so 
may I introduce him and some of his family 
to you ? 

It is rare indeed to find in any family so 
much genius transmitted from father to son 
for more than two centuries as there was in 
that of the Wesleys. Here are six genera- 
tions : 

1. Bartholomew studied physic at the Uni- 
versity and, when ejected for Puritanism in 
1662 from the living of Allington in Dorset- 
shire, he practised as a doctor. 

2. His son John was an ardent Puritan, 



8 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

imprisoned on no less than four occasions. 
He died at an early age and was distinguished 
when at New Inn Hall at Oxford for his 
proficiency in Oriental studies. 

3. Samuel, Rector of Epworth, a scholar of 
some repute and father of the famous Wesleys. 

4. Charles, the poet of Methodism. 

5. Samuel, the musician, one of the pio- 
neers of modern organ playing. 

6. Samuel Sebastian, the celebrated com- 
poser, organist in Gloucester Cathedral, who 
died in 1875. 

Talent, not without eccentricity, seemed 
the natural gift of this remarkable family, to 
which was added beauty in the females and 
distinction of appearance in the male mem- 
bers. Samuel, the third on our list, was, 
naturally, a puritan by upbringing ; but he 
became a Churchman by conviction. He 
obtained the Rectory of Epworth in the Isle 
of Axholm in Lincolnshire, and the chaplaincy 
of a regiment. This, however, he lost ; and 



LECTURE I 9 

his dissenting enemies stopped his getting any- 
further preferment save the living of Wroote, 
near to Epworth. He married the daughter 
of an ejected minister, Susannah Annesley, 
who was herself connected with the noble 
family of that name. She had no less than 
nineteen children, but few of these survived, 
among them the three famous brothers Samuel, 
John, and Charles. The girls, had they had 
their brother's advantages and education, 
might have been almost equally distinguished. 
As it was, however, Samuel had enough to do 
to give his sons an education worthy of their 
abilities. The eldest son Samuel was a 
scholar of Westminster and a student of 
Christ Church, a friend of Bishop Atterbury, 
and a sound scholar. Owing to his Toryism 
he was never more than an usher (under- 
master) at Westminster and Master of Tiver- 
ton School : and he continued to hold the 
principles of a High Churchman to the last. 
He was an excellent and affectionate brother, 



IO SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

ready to help John and Charles in their 
education ; but from the first he recog- 
nised the tendencies of Methodism to be 
schismatical ; and in a letter to his mother 
just before his death he pointed out the danger 
of his brothers' teaching. Because he was 
not in sympathy with the movement he has 
been condemned as "worldly," as dull, as 
without genius ; but a sentence in this let- 
ter reveals something of the incisiveness of 
John. "As I told Jack," he writes, " I am not 
afraid that the church should excommunicate 
him, discipline is at too low an ebb ; but 
that he should excommunicate the church." 
John went to school at the Charterhouse, 
thence to Christ Church, Oxford, and to a 
fellowship at Lincoln College. Charles fol- 
lowed in the footsteps of Samuel and became 
a student of Christ Church. Academic 
distinction was the lot of all the sons of the 
Rector of Epworth. 

The home of the family was amid the fens 



LECTURE I II 

of Lincolnshire ; and the fenland had still 
many of its peculiar characteristics during 
the childhood and youth of the Wesleys. 
The Isle of Axholm had been but recently 
literally an island, rising out of the swamps 
and often approached only by boat. These 
islands were inhabited by a wild uncouth race 
who lived partly as farmers, and partly by 
capturing the fish and birds which swarmed 
in the surrounding fens. Here lived John 
Wesley and his family. By birth they were 
emphatically gentlefolk, by education highly 
cultivated ; they were miserably poor, severed 
from the society of their equals among a 
people with whom they could have but little 
sympathy. All of a deeply religious spirit ; 
the father a pious and conscientious but 
disappointed scholar, the mother sternly 
determined to do her duty, the sons endowed 
with singular gifts of leadership, the daughters 
sensitive and refined, condemned to live as 
peasant girls. A family so able, so thrown 



12 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

on its own resources, so out of contact with 
the world, of so imperious a spirit, was almost 
bound to develop on exceptional lines. Their 
virtues and their strength were as abnormal 
as their weakness, their singularly active 
minds were equally capable of the greatest 
deeds and the most surprising mistakes. 
All the girls were unfortunate in the choice 
of their partners and had sad lives. John, 
the most gifted of all this gifted household, 
was able to transform England by his preach- 
ing ; yet made the most astonishing blunders 
in the conduct of his private life, though 
shewing a talent for administration worthy 
of his celebrated namesake, Arthur Wesley, or 
Wellesley, Duke of Wellington. In studying 
the movement we must always keep Epworth 
in the background. 1 But there was another 
side of the life of the sons of the Rector. 



1 To shew how inaccessible Epworth must have been, I may men- 
tion that when I went there in an automobile, the sides of the roads 
were pointed out to me as paved so as to make a mule track about 
three feet in width. 



LECTURE I 13 

Samuel's friend Atterbury, the Tory Bishop 
of Rochester, is one of the most remarkable 
figures of his age. John and Charles at Ox- 
ford were poor enough but found a welcome 
in society congenial to them. Their birth 
and manners gave them access to a coterie of 
religious yet cultured circles, especially at 
Stanton in Gloucestershire ; and they always 
comported themselves with a consciousness 
of a perfectly secure position in society. 
Neither of them was in the slightest degree 
dazzled by rank, wealth, or worldly position. 
When Count Zinzendorf, the great German 
noble, and the patron of the Moravians, spoke 
with the authority of a pious prince to John, 
he was answered in a spirit as uncompromis- 
ing as his own. Selina, the famous and pious 
Countess of Huntingdon, " the elect lady " 
of evangelical preachers, might patronise 
Whitefield ; but could not take a high tone 
with the Wesleys. Indeed, the aristocracy 
who preferred the treasure of the Gospel to be 



14 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

contained in clergy, who might be described 
as " earthen vessels," disliked the Wesleys, 
whose greatest successes were obtained among 
the middle class. None the less their influ- 
ence was in a measure due to the social ad- 
vantages which they had enjoyed when Ox- 
ford students. We, however, have to do 
with John Wesley as illustrating the England 
of his day, and we may well begin to use him 
for our purposes as a traveller. He had been 
one the greater part of his life ; but a good 
starting point for us will be after his visit 
to Germany in 1738, immediately after the 
time from which he dates his conversion. 
From that day almost till his death in 1791, 
John Wesley was almost continually on the 
road, preaching from town to town wherever 
he could get a hearing. 

For years he seems to have travelled con- 
stantly on horseback, but later in life he 
made use of a postchaise. The distances he 
covered are almost incredible. Here is an ex- 



LECTURE I 15 

tract from his Journal, dated August 7, 1759, 
when he was in his fifty fourth year. "After 
preaching at four (because of the harvest) I 
took horse and rode easily to London. In- 
deed I wanted a little rest; having rode in 
seven months about four and twenty hun- 
dred miles." As we have seen, Wesley often 
read as he rode, and this practice taught him 
the value of a slack rein. "I asked myself 
How is it no horse stumbles when I am read- 
ing ? No account can possibly be given but 
this : because I throw the reins on his back. 
I then set myself to observe ; and I aver 
that in riding about an hundred thousand 
miles I scarce remember any horse (except 
two that would fall head over heels any- 
way) to fall or to make a considerable stumble 
while I rode with a slack rein. To fancy, 
therefore, that a tight rein prevents stum- 
bling is a capital blunder. I have repeated 
the trial more than most men in the kingdom 
can do. A slack rein will prevent stum- 



i6 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

bling if anything will. But in some horses 
nothing can." But all his rides were not 
so leisurely, and I will read you an account 
of a ride in Wales. He started from Shrews- 
bury at 4 a.m., and at two in the after- 
noon was forty two or three miles off, preach- 
ing in the marketplace at Llanidloes. He 
and his companions then rode to Fountain- 
head where he hoped to lodge ; but "Mr. B. 
being unwilling" they remounted at 7 p.m. 
and rode on to Ross-fair. They missed the 
track and found themselves at the edge of a 
bog and had to be put on the right road ; 
again they missed their way, " it being half 
past nine." They did not find Ross-fair till 
between 11 and 12. When they were in 
bed the ostler and a miner had a ride on their 
beasts, and in the morning Wesley found 
his mare "bleeding like a pig" in the stable, 
with a wound behind. This was on July 
24 ; on the 27th he was at Pembroke ; " I rested 
that night, having not quite recovered my 



LECTURE I 17 

journey from Shrewsbury to Ross-fair/' He 
was in his 626. year ! The dangers of travel 
were considerable, and one of the most re- 
markable facts in regard to Wesley was that 
he was never molested by highwaymen, who 
literally swarmed in England throughout 
the eighteenth century. They were often in 
league with the post boys, many of whom 
were highwaymen themselves. When Wesley 
was 76 years of age he writes : "Just at this 
time there was a combination among many 
of the postchaise drivers on the Bath road, 
especially those that drove by night, to deliver 
their passengers into each other's hands. 
One driver stopped at the spot they had 
appointed, where another waited to attack 
the chaise. In consequence of this many 
were robbed ; but I had a good Protector 
still. I have travelled all roads by day or 
by night for these forty years, and never was 
interrupted yet." Four years later, in 1782, 
he writes : "About one on Wednesday morn- 



18 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

ing we were informed that three highwaymen 
were on the road and had robbed all the 
coaches that had passed, some within an 
hour or two. I felt no uneasiness on this 
account, knowing that God would take care 
of us : and He did so ; for before we came to 
the spot all the highwaymen were taken." 
I cannot but think it remarkable that Wesley 
was never molested, because, especially in his 
early days of itinerancy, everything was done 
to hinder his work and his enemies were quite 
unscrupulous enough to set the highway- 
men on him. Perhaps the highwaymen had 
their scruples ! In the early days of Wesley's 
mission the invasion of England by the forces 
of the young Pretender took place. This 
was the period at which he and his followers 
suffered most from mob violence and also 
from charges of Popery and disaffection. 
I will take the latter first, as there is 
hardly any feature in the 18th century so 
marked in England as the dread and horror 



LECTURE I 19 

with which the Roman Catholic religion 
was regarded. I remember a few years ago 
examining a number of cartoons and carica- 
tures during the rebellion of 1745 and almost 
every one of them had to do with Popery. 
To the English the invasion of the country 
by Charles Edward was like the Spanish 
Armada, an attempt to impose the papal 
yoke on the land. In the trinity of the 
nation's enemies the Pope stood first : "From 
the Pope, the Devil and the Pretender, Good 
Lord, deliver us." It was hatred of Rome 
that completely blinded people's eyes to the 
romance of the young prince's enterprise, 
and to his undoubted claim to the throne. 
Neither the government nor the sovereign 
were popular ; but it was no question of 
popularity where Popery was concerned. 
The House of Hanover stood for Protestant- 
ism and the nation rallied to its support. 
Even that rapacious and cynical infidel, Fred- 
erick the Great of Prussia, was the darling 



20 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

of England as the "Protestant Hero"; and 
the Duke of Cumberland's cruelties were for- 
gotten because he saved England from the 
Pope. Like Marlborough and Wellington 
he was known as "the Great Duke." 

No charge could be more effective against 
an opponent than that of Romanism and 
many good men had to endure it. The 
great Bishop Butler was exposed to it for 
complaining in his visitation charge to the 
clergy of Durham of the disgraceful neglect 
into which they had allowed their fabrics 
to fall. The most deadly shaft levelled 
against John Wesley was Bishop Lavington 
of Exeter's book, "The enthusiasm of the 
Methodists and Papists compared." The 
visions, the trances, the ecstasies of the 
Methodists, reminded good Protestants of 
such Catholic mystics as St. Teresa and St. 
John of the Cross. The reasonableness of 
Protestantism, whether Anglican or non- 
conformist, was contrasted with the excited 



LECTURE I 21 

and hysterical manifestation of religious 
fervour in Popish countries, and the fervour 
of the Wesleys and their followers was espe- 
cially unpopular on this account. The furious 
hatred of anything approaching Romanism 
is the key to much of the thought and feeling 
of the age. But though undoubtedly an 
enthusiast, Wesley was far in advance of his 
age as regards toleration. He had, moreover, 
a curious and chivalrous regard for the 
memory of Mary Queen of Scots ; and he con- 
sidered Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen and Prot- 
estant champion, as little better than a royal 
criminal. He at least would never have said 
as Puff says in The Critic, " Hush ! no scandal 
against Queen Elizabeth." On the contrary, 
he says in his Journal, "But what then was 
Queen Elizabeth ? As just and merciful as 
Nero, and as good a Christian as Mahomet." 
Thus he wrote in 1768, and if he held such a 
view twenty three years earlier, no wonder 
he was suspected of Jacobitism and Popery. 



22 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

Far more to his credit is the fact that he 
resolutely refused to indulge in violent abuse 
of the ancient Church. On the contrary, he 
found so little true religion anywhere that 
wherever it was manifested he welcomed 
it. Charles Wesley's son went over to the 
Church of Rome, to the great grief of his 
parents and, possibly, to the scandal of 
Methodism. This is how John writes and 
his words are so remarkable that I quote 
them at some length. 

" He has not changed his religion ; he has 
changed his opinions and mode of worship, 
but that is not religion. . . . He has suf- 
fered unspeakable loss because his new 
opinions are unfavourable to religion. . . . 
What then is religion. It is happiness in 
God or in the knowledge and love of God. 
It is faith working by love producing right- 
eousness and peace and Joy in the Holy Ghost. 
In other words, it is a heart and life devoted 
to God. . . . Now either he has this religion 



LECTURE I 23 

or he has not : if he has, he will not finally 
perish, notwithstanding the absurd unscrip- 
tural opinions he has embraced ... let 
him only have his right faith . . . and he 
is quite safe. He may indeed roll a few years 
in purging fire but he will surely go to heaven 
at last." 

No wonder, therefore, considering the 
bigotry of his age, that Wesley was exposed 
to persecution by the mobs : but his leniency 
towards Romanism was not the only cause 
of this. To-day, however, I wish to utilize 
the story of the attacks made on the Metho- 
dists to shew the state of the country. Mob 
law was powerful wherever population was 
dense. Towns were gradually growing up 
and the English system of legal machinery 
was devised rather for a rural population. 
There was no police properly so called. 
Shakespeare's Dogberry and Verges would 
not have been caricatures in the 18th cen- 
tury. Wesley himself speaks of the watch- 



24 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

men as " those poor fools." The violence of 
the mob was a feature of the 18th century 
in England. Perhaps you may recollect 
Hogarth's picture of the chairing of a member 
of Parliament after an election, — the man 
laying about him with a flail, the prize- 
fights, etc. Riots play an important part in 
the history of the time and the no-popery 
riot in 1780 when Lord George Gordon stirred 
up the fanaticism of the London mob is only 
one of many similar occurrences. Never did 
the brothers Wesley, John and Charles, shew 
the courage of good breeding more conspicu- 
ously than when they faced an infuriated 
rabble and saved themselves and their fol- 
lowers by the dignity of their demeanour and 
the fearlesss mildness of their conduct amid 
scenes of tumult. Witness the affair at 
Wednesbury and Walsall. The mob dragged 
John Wesley from one magistrate to another. 
Some tried to protect him but were over- 
powered. To quote the Journal: "To 



LECTURE I 25 

attempt speaking was vain ; for the noise 
on every side was like the roaring of the sea. 
So they dragged me along till they came to 
the town where seeing the door of a large 
house open, I attempted to go in ; but a man 
catching me by the hair pulled me back into 
the middle of the mob. ... I continued 
speaking all the time to those within hearing, 
feeling neither pain nor weariness. . . I 
stood at the door (of a shop) and asked 'Are 
you willing to hear me speak ? ' Many cried 
out ' No, no, knock his brains out, kill him at 
once, etc.* ... In the mean time my 
strength and voice returned and I broke out 
aloud in prayer. And now the man who just 
before headed the mob, turned, and said, 
Sir I will spend my life for you : follow me 
and not one soul here shall touch a hair of 
your head." Throughout the riot Wesley 
notices : "From first to last I heard none give 
me a reviling word, or call me by any oppro- 
brious name ; but the cry of one and all was 



26 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

"The Preacher! the Parson! the Minister !" 
A man rushed at him to strike him but paused 
and merely stroked his head, saying, "Why, 
what soft hair he has!" In Cornwall at- 
tempts were made to stop Methodism by 
calling in the aid of the Press-Gang. Thomas 
Maxfield was caught and offered to the 
captain of a ship in Mount's Bay, who refused 
to take him. An attempt was actually made 
to press John Wesley. A clergyman, Dr. 
Borlase, acted in his magisterial capacity to 
further this infamous project. But a Mr. 
Eustick who was charged with executing the 
warrant had the sense to see the indecency of 
arresting such a man to serve in the navy 
as a common seaman. He conducted Mr. 
Wesley to Dr. Borlase's door and told him 
he had done his duty and that his prisoner 
was free to depart. Wesley's description of 
the event is characteristic. Mr. Eustick 
was visited by him in order to be taken to 
Dr. Borlase's to be pressed into the army. 



LECTURE I 27 

"I went thither, and asked, ' Is Mr. Eustick 
here V After some pause one said ' Yes ' ; and 
he showed me into the parlour. When he 
came down he said * O Sir will you be so good 
as to go with me to the doctor's ? ' I an- 
swered ' Sir I came for that purpose/ ' Are 
you ready Sir,' I answered, * Yes.' * Sir I am 
not quite ready, in a little time, in a quarter 
of an hour I will call upon you.' In about 
three quarters of an hour he came and finding 
that there was no remedy, he called for his 
horse and put forward to Dr. Borlase's house ; 
but he was in no haste so we were an hour 
and a quarter riding three or four measured 
miles. As soon as he came into the yard 
he asked a servant, 'Is the Doctor at home' 
upon whose answering 'No Sir he is gone to 
Church ;' he presently said ' Well Sir I have 
executed my commission. I have done Sir ; 
I have no more to say.' " 

Not that Wesley was not in serious danger 
at times, especially in Cornwall. Once at 



28 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

Falmouth the house was filled with privateers- 
men. Only a wainscot partition separated 
him from the mob. "Indeed to all appear- 
ances our lives were not worth an hour's pur- 
chase." When the door was broken down he 
came forth bareheaded (" For I purposely left 
off my hat that they all might see my face"). 
His calmness saved him ; for though countless 
hands were lifted up to strike or throw at him 
yet they were "one and all stopped in the mid- 
way so that I had not even a speck of dirt 
on my clothes!" Ferocious as were the 
British mobs of this period they were capable 
of generous sentiments and chivalrous ad- 
miration for courage. The people were often 
set on Wesley by the gentry and, to their 
shame be it said, by some of the clergy. The 
excuse, both in Cornwall in 1745 and in New- 
castle, was that the Methodist societies were 
with the Pretenders. "All the gentlemen in 
these parts say," Wesley was told, "that you 
have been a long time in France and Spain, 



LECTURE I 29 

and are now set hither by the Pretender ; 
and that these societies are to join him." 

It is scarcely necessary to do more than 
allude to the extreme brutality of the amuse- 
ments of people in England in the eighteenth 
century. Dog fighting, bear baiting, bull 
baiting, cock fighting, were universal and, 
as we may see from Hogarth's pictures, 
cruelty to animals was universal. On one 
occasion a baited bull was turned loose to 
interrupt a congregation assembled to hear 
Wesley preach. One of the ringleaders of 
the mob at Walsall who ended by taking the 
part of the Methodists was a noted prize- 
fighter in a bear garden. 

John and Charles Wesley began their 
religious labours at Oxford in the city prison, 
Bocardo, ministering to the prisoners, and 
the Journal throws a lurid light on the condi- 
tion of felons, criminals, and debtors in Eng- 
land. The system was atrocious, there was 
no real control ; and the jailers farmed the 



30 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

place and made what they could out of it. 
The result was that if a man paid he could 
do what he liked in jail ; and, if he could 
not, he was treated just as his keepers pleased. 
Side by side, therefore, with the utmost squa- 
lor and misery was almost indescribable prof- 
ligacy. "I visited the Marshalsea prison," 
writes Wesley, "on February 3, 1753, a nursery 
of all manner of wickedness. O shame to 
man that there should be such a place, such 
a picture of hell upon earth ! And shame 
to those who bear the name of Christ that 
there should need any prison at all in Chris- 
tendom." Let me quote an extract from a 
letter to the London Chronicle, Friday, Jan. 2, 
1761, "Sir, of all the seats of woe on this 
side hell, few, I suppose, exceed or equal 
Newgate. If any region of horror could 
exceed it, a few years ago Newgate in Bristol 
did ; so great was the filth, the stench, the 
misery and wickedness which shocked all 
who had a spark of humanity left." 



LECTURE I 31 

The prison at Bristol had been reformed 
by a good keeper, who, says Wesley, "deserves 
to be remembered full as well as the man of 
Ross." It was clean, there was no drunken- 
ness nor brawling, no immorality, no idleness, 
and a decent service in the chapel. These 
reforms themselves shew what most prisons 
of the time must have been like. 

Another evil was smuggling : wherever a 
boat could land there was a conspiracy to de- 
fraud the revenue. The business, for it was 
nothing else, was run on the most extensive 
scale and the whole countryside was engaged 
in it. The smugglers were armed and dis- 
ciplined and prepared to offer furious re- 
sistance to the officers of the Revenue. 
Wesley set his face sternly against the 
practice. 

"The stewards met at St. Ives, from the 
western part of Cornwall. The next day I 
began examining the society ; but I was 
soon obliged to stop short. I found an 



32 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

accursed thing among them ; well nigh one 
and all bought and sold ' uncustomed ' goods. 
I therefore delayed speaking to any more till 
I had met them all together. This I did in 
the evening and told them plain, either they 
must put this abomination away or they 
would see my face no more." 

This was in November, 1753. In June, 
1757, Wesley was in the north at Sunderland. 

"I met the Society and told them plain, 
none could stay with us, unless he would 
part with all sin ; particularly robbing the 
King, selling or buying run goods ; which I 
would no more suffer than robbing on the 
highway." 

In 1762 he is able to record of Cornwall : 

"The detestable practice of cheating the 
King (smuggling) is no more found in our 
societies, and since the accursed thing has 
been put away, the work of God has every- 
where increased." 

The Cornish practice of "wrecking" still 



LECTURE I 33 

continued and in 1776 Wesley writes, "I was 
afterwards inquiring if that scandal in Corn- 
wall of plundering wrecked vessels still con- 
tinued." He was told that it was as great as 
ever and only the Methodists would not 
share in it. Wesley remarks, with his usual 
good sense when dealing with a practical 
matter, "The Gentry of Cornwall may 
totally prevent it whenever they please. 
Only let the law take its course and the 
plundering will stop. Even if every labourer 
or tinner (i.e. tin miner) guilty of it were to 
be discharged and his name advertised to 
prevent his getting respectable employment, 
there would be no more of it." In his pere- 
grination Wesley did not disdain to visit 
and to note in his Journal objects of curiosity 
and interest. His active mind could not help 
occupying itself with anything exceptional, 
and many a traveller with nothing to do but 
investigate the locality has seen much less 
than he. Here is his description of how 



34 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

apprentices were made free of the corpora- 
tion of Alnwick : 

"Sixteen or seventeen, we were informed, 
were to receive their freedom this day, and 
in order thereto (such is the unparalleled wis- 
dom of the present corporation, as well as of 
their forefathers), to walk through a great 
bog (purposely preserved for the occasion ; 
otherwise it might have been drained long 
ago), which takes some of them to the neck, 
and many of them to the breast." 

A few months later he is in the south near 
Carisbrooke Castle, whither he walked in 
the afternoon. 

"It stands upon a solid rock upon the top 
of an hill and commands a beautiful prospect. 
There is a well in it, cut quite through the 
rock, said to be seventy two yards deep, and 
another in the citadel, near an hundred. 
They drew up the water by an ass, which 
they assured us was sixty years old. But 
all the stately appartments lie in ruins. Only 



LECTURE I 35 

just enough of them is left to shew the 
chamber where poor King Charles was con- 
fined, and the windows through which he 
attempted to escape." 

From the steeple of Glasgow Cathedral 
Wesley surveys the country. 

"A more fruitful and better cultivated 
plain is scarce to be seen in England. In- 
deed nothing is wanted but more trade 
(which would naturally bring more people) 
to make a great part of Scotland in no way 
inferior to the best counties in England." 

When he came to Edinburgh he was not 
so pleased with the High Street. "The 
situation of the city, on a hill shelving down 
on both sides, as well as to the east is inex- 
pressibly fine. And the main street so broad 
and finely paved, with lofty houses on either 
side (many of them seven or eight stories 
high), is far beyond any in Great Britain. 
But how can it be suffered that all manner 
of filth should be thrown even into this 



36 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

street continually ? Where are the magis- 
tracy, the gentry, the nobility of the land ? 
Have they no concern for the honour of their 
nation ? How long shall the capital city of 
Scotland, yea, and the chief street of it stink 
worse than a common sewer ? Will no lover 
of this country, or of decency and common- 
sense find a remedy for it ? " 

On one occasion he went to the Tower of 
London, where lions used to be kept, with a 
man who played the German flute to see 
whether music had any influence on animals. 
The lions rose up and came to the front of 
the den and seemed all attention. A tiger 
started up and began continually leaping 
over and crawling under a lion. Wesley 
asks "Can we account for this by any prin- 
ciple of mechanism ? can we account for it 
at all?" At Cam Brae in Cornwall he ad- 
mires the Druidical remains. At Windsor 
he views the improvements of that "active 
and useful man the Duke of Cumberland," 



LECTURE I 37 

especially the triangular tower built at the 
edge of Windsor Park. Here also he visited 
the house of a lover of the antique, "The 
oddest I ever saw with my eyes. Every- 
thing breathes antiquity ; scarce a bedstead 
is to be seen that is not an hundred and 
fifty years old ; and everything is out of the 
common way : for six hours I suppose these 
oddities would much delight a curious man ; 
but after six months they would probably 
give him no more pleasure than a collection 
of feathers." When he was eighty we find 
him in Holland delighted with the country 
and its people and his reception by Madam 
de Wassenaar. "She received us with that 
easy openness and affability which is almost 
peculiar to persons of quality." The great 
hall in the Staat haus at Amsterdam reminds 
him of his old College hall at Christ Church, 
it is "near as large." 

It is a temptation to me to multiply exam- 
ples of how the great preacher illustrates the 



38 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

country, every way of which was familiar 
to him. After his long journeyings no man 
of his time could have known England, 
Scotland, Wales, and Ireland better. Few, 
with all our facilities of travel, know it half 
as well. Much of it was wild and almost 
uninhabited. Some of the roads were enough 
to daunt the hardiest of travellers. On 
one occasion the road to Ely for a mile and a 
half was under water. The chaise found the 
roads impassable near St. Ives, so Wesley 
borrowed a horse and rode forward till the 
ground was completely under water. Then 
he borrowed a boat "full twice as large as a 
kneading-trough. " He was seventy two years 
old at this time ! So wild were parts of the 
island that John Haine, a disciple of Wesley, 
relates that he once saw what he supposed 
to be a supernatural appearance in the clear 
sky, "a creature like a swan, but much larger, 
part black and part brown, which flew at 
him, went just over his head, and lighting 



LECTURE I 39 

on the ground stood staring upon him." 
This was undoubtedly a great bustard, and 
Southey in his " Life of Wesley" quotes the 
Gentleman s Magazine to shew that one 
was seen as late as 1801. As we have seen, 
the very people of this time seem almost as 
unfamiliar to us as the scenery would have 
been. But is it not strange that with a guide 
whose thoughts were almost entirely in the 
world to come we should have seen so much 
and could see so much more, if only we could 
study him more closely ? He lays bare to 
us England during the very long and active 
life of a man born just after the death 
of William III, who saw George III thirty 
years and more upon the throne. Wesley 
might have heard of the peace of Utrecht 
in 1713 as a boy, of the South Sea Bubble 
in 1720 as a youth, and he lived to hear of the 
French Revolution in 1789 and the fall of 
the Bastille. And throughout this long 
period of time the remarkable thing is his 



40 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

amazing vitality. He says he never felt 
low spirited : a sleepless night is so unusual 
that it is specially commented on. Till his 
85th year he never acknowledged that he 
felt old : his youthfulness surprised him when 
recording his eighty eighth and following 
birthdays. No man had therefore a greater 
opportunity for seeing what England was like ; 
and Wesley used it to the full. Yet it is a 
strange and perhaps an original guide whom 
we have used and it may be that the impres- 
sion he leaves upon your minds is not quite 
what I had designed. Suppose my lecture 
should have been to some of you like the 
sermon of which George Herbert writes, 
"Where all lack sense, God takes the text 
and preaches patience;" and, my listeners, 
you have surrendered yourselves to your 
own thoughts and dreams. You may have 
pictured in the England of the eighteenth cen- 
tury a moorland on a windy winter evening, 
and on the near horizon the glare of an ill-lit 



LECTURE I 41 

manufacturing town, and a single figure small 
and slight, his long gray hair falling over his 
shoulders, sitting on a tired horse plodding 
forward with loosened rein. It is a subject 
the genius of a Millet might have made as 
memorable as his famous "Angelus," — the 
two peasants praying as they hear the bell 
across the damp fields at even. And your 
dream, vision, picture, call it what you will, 
would be no less an adequate clue to the mean- 
ing of that famous age, than would some of 
the most stirring scenes in the history of 
Great Britain in those thrilling times. For 
in a sense John Wesley expressed the spirit 
of many thousands of its people. 



LECTURE II 
GEORGE CRABBE 

I have chosen the subject of George 
Crabbe, the Suffolk poet, partly out of 
attachment to the county of my birth, but 
also because I have certain faint though 
undoubted family links in connection with 
him. 1 In addition to this, his character, as 
a man as well as a poet, has a certain attrac- 
tion for me ; and even though there has been 
a revival of interest in him, comparatively 
few have studied him, or are acquainted with 
the facts of his life. Crabbe, however, was 
singularly fortunate in having a son, possessed 
of many valuable qualities as a biographer, 

1 My father's first cousin, the Ven. Robert Groome, Archdeacon of 
Suffolk, the intimate friend of Edward Fitzgerald, was the grandson 
of a native of Aldeburgh who owned the Unity smack in which 
Crabbe sailed to London in 1780. My maternal great-grandparents, 
as will appear, also knew the poet. 

42 



LECTURE II 43 

for not only was he affectionate, and extraor- 
dinarily proud of his father, but at the same 
time he was not blind to his defects as 
a man or as a writer. And it must be re- 
membered that Crabbe at his death occupied 
a place in public estimation, together with 
Scott and Byron ; that the latter had de- 
scribed him as "Nature's sternest painter and 
the best," and had written of him, "Crabbe, 
the first of living poets." A son, therefore, 
who under such circumstances could refrain 
from indiscriminating eulogy of a beloved 
father just after his death must be a man to 
be trusted. 

George Crabbe was born in 1754 at Alde- 
burgh, a somewhat squalid little fishing 
town on the coast of Suffolk, rejoicing, how- 
ever, in the dignity of a corporation, and 
returning two members to Parliament. His 
father was saltmaster and general factotum 
of the borough ; a man, to all appearances, 
of rough manners, not improved by unfor- 



44 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

tunate circumstances ; but sufficiently intelli- 
gent to recognise that in George he had 
a son who would repay a good education. 1 
Not that with his narrow means he could do 
much ; but he certainly did his best, and 
more than could be expected. George was 
intended for the medical profession ; and 
it may be of interest to hear how a boy was 
educated to be a doctor in the eighteenth 
century. Young Crabbe was sent to school 
at Bungay, where he remained till his eleventh 
or twelfth year. He was next sent to a Mr. 
Richard Haddon at Stowmarket, where he 
showed considerable aptitude for mathematics, 
in which his father was also proficient. His 
master, to quote the biography, "though 
neither a Porson nor a Parr, laid the founda- 
tions of a fair classical education also." But 
he soon had to return home and had to work 
in the warehouse of Slaughden Quay, piling 

1 One cannot fail to recall Horace's generous acknowledgement of 
the liberality of his father, "macro pauper agello," in sending him to 
Rome to be educated. Sat. I. vi. 71. 



LECTURE II 45 

up butter and cheese, duties which the poor 
boy — he was but thirteen, and was of a 
dreamy, meditative temperament — bitterly 
resented. But his father had not forgotten 
that George was to be a doctor, and seeing 
an advertisement, "Apprentice Wanted," he 
sent him to Wickhambook, near Bury St. 
Edmunds. There he was treated as a mere 
drudge, slept with the ploughboy, worked 
on the farm, and learned his profession 
apparently by delivering medicine bottles 
to the neighbouring villages. In 1771, he 
removed to Woodbridge as apprentice to a 
Mr. Page, where he pursued his studies under 
more favourable circumstances. Here it was 
he met his future bride, Miss Elmy, at the 
neighbouring village of Parham, won a prize 
poem in the Lady's Magazine owned by 
a Mr. Wheble, on the subject of "Hope"; 
and later he published at Ipswich a poem 
entitled "Inebriety," in the preface of which 
he apologises "for those parts wherein I 



46 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

have taken such great liberties with Mr. 
Pope." And it was certainly to Pope that 
Crabbe owed his inspiration. Now to imi- 
tate Pope's versification is easy, and to 
copy his mannerisms not impossible ; but 
to gain a double portion of his spirit, to emu- 
late his epigrammatic terseness, above all 
to acquire anything like his knowledge of life 
and human nature can only be done by a 
man who is even in a measure akin to him 
in genius. Whether Crabbe was, it must 
be our endeavour to decide. 

"Inebriety" did not catch on in Suffolk, 
a land which bears the epithet "silly" in 
two senses. I prefer the one which alludes 
to its numerous churches, "selig," or pious. 
At any rate, no young author could expect 
an appreciative audience of clerics when he 
wrote thus : 

"Lo proud Flaminius at the splendid board, 
The easy chaplain of an atheist lord, 
Quaffs the bright juice with all the gust of sense, 
And clouds his brain in torpid elegance." 



LECTURE II 47 

Crabbe completed his apprenticeship in 
1775 and once more returned to Aldeburgh. 
His family circumstances were extremely 
distressed, his father had changed for the 
worse, and his mother's health had broken 
down. Again he was compelled to act as a 
warehouseman at Slaughden Quay. He man- 
aged to get to London for a short time, 
nominally to walk the hospitals ; but having 
no funds he had, as he expresses it, to "pick 
up a little surgical knowledge as cheap as he 
could." After ten months' privation, Crabbe 
returned to Aldeburgh to become the assistant 
of a surgeon-apothecary, named Maskill, 1 
who had opened a shop in the borough, and 
on his retirement Crabbe, though "imper- 
fectly grounded in the commonest details 
of his profession," set up for himself. His 
medical career was a complete failure. He 
had not the requisite knowledge and lacked 

1 In the " Life " by his son it is implied that Crabbe was Maskill's 
assistant; but this is denied in Huchon's "George Crabbe and his 
Times," p. 63. 



48 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

means to acquire it, nor was he able to adapt 
himself to the rough surroundings amid which 
he lived. Aldeburgh was peopled, to quote 
his own words, by — 

"A wild amphibious race 
With sullen woe expressed on every face, 
Who far from civil acts and social fly, 
And scowl at strangers with suspicious eye." 

Sneered at as a poor and useless scholar 
by the relatives of Miss Elmy, to whom he 
was now engaged, regarded as a failure by 
his rough but not ungenerous father, Crabbe's 
life was far from happy ; the only relaxa- 
tion he found was in the study of botany, and 
the only encouragement in the society of the 
officers of the Warwickshire militia, who 
were for a time quartered in the town. Their 
colonel, General Conway, showed the young 
surgeon attention, and gave him some valu- 
able Latin books on botany. At last, wearied 
and disgusted with his life, Crabbe gave up 
attempting to be a doctor ; and, aided by a 



LECTURE II 49 

loan of five pounds from Mr. Dudley North, 
brother to the candidate for the borough, 
he made his way to London in 1780 as a 
literary adventurer. 1 

The early struggles of a man who has 
won literary fame are only of importance 
in so far as they affect his subsequent work. 
Crabbe's intellect was essentially scientific 
rather than imaginative. His poetry is, like 
Dutch art, remarkable for the finish of details 
and for exactness of observation. It is 
the same when he depicts what he saw as 
when he describes emotions and feelings. 
He had to understand before he could write. 
His hobby, as we have seen, was botany : 
he first showed talent as a mathematician ; 
nor, because he failed in his medical work, 
need we suppose that his want of success was 
due in any way to intellectual deficiencies. 

1 So the " Life." Huchon points out that his name at this time 
was Long, and that he subsequently assumed the name of North. 
Crabbe went to London on the Unity smack, the property of Robin- 
son Groome, grandfather of Archdeacon Groome, the intimate 
friend of E. Fitzgerald. Huchon, op. cit., p. 8l. 
E 



50 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

Place Crabbe in a different situation. Sup- 
pose him to have walked the hospitals of 
London or Edinburgh, and to have made 
his way as a physician. He might well have 
taken an honoured place among the scientific 
men of his age. But look at the facts. His 
training was hardly better than that of an 
assistant in a chemist's store in the most 
remote village nowadays. This, for example, 
was the hospital which Crabbe had "walked" : 

"Such is that room which one rude beam divides, 

And naked rafters form the sloping sides ; 

* * * 

Here on a matted flock, with dust o'erspread, 

The drooping wretch reclines his languid head. 

* * * 

But soon a loud and hasty summons calls, 

Shakes the thin roof, and echoes round the walls, 

* * * 

Anon a figure enters, quaintly neat, 

All pride and business, bustle and conceit. 

* * * 

A potent quack, long versed in human ills, 
Who first insults the victim whom he kills ; 
Whose murderous hand a drowsy Bench protect, 
And whose most tender mercy is neglect." 1 

1 "The Village." 



LECTURE II 51 

We see the influence of Pope in the versifica- 
tion ; but of personal experience in the 
subject. 

True, Crabbe detested his profession, and 
thus apostrophises medical books as — 

"Ye frigid tribe, on whom I wasted long 
The tedious hours, and ne'er indulged in song ; 
Ye first seducers of my easy heart, 
Who promised knowledge ye could not impart. " 

But for all this, when in later life as a 
clergyman he used to prescribe for his poorer 
parishioners, he seems to have shown a power 
of diagnosis which made it evident that, 
though he failed as a surgeon apothecary, 
he might, had he had the requisite education, 
have succeeded as a consulting physician. 1 

Because he took Holy Orders and won his 
fame as a poet while a clergyman, Crabbe's 
experiences, on which he founded his rhymed 
tales — for such his poems really are — are 
considered to have been mainly clerical. 

1 In the "Life" Crabbe is said to have prescribed for his parish- 
ioners at Muston with great success. 



52 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

But, to understand him aright, we must re- 
member that he was more or less engaged in 
the practice of medicine from the age of four- 
teen to that of twenty-five. It would be easy 
to quote many lines wherein the doctor and 
not the parson is revealed, and he never 
lost the professional dislike of quacks or 
contempt of valetudinarians. 

Let us now consider how Crabbe's experi- 
ences of Aldeburgh appear in his poems. I 
will take most of my extracts from his early 
poem, "The Village," but a few will be from 
"The Borough," which did not appear till 
more than twenty years later. 

In "The Village" Crabbe boldly asks: 

"From Truth and Nature shall we widely stray, 
Where Virgil, not where Fancy, leads the way ?" 

and declines to follow the fashion of speaking 
of rural life as the height of felicity. He 
says : 

"I grant indeed that fields and flocks have charms 
For him that grazes or for him that farms ; 



LECTURE II 53 

But when amid such pleasing scenes I trace 

The poor laborious natives of the place. 
* * * 

Then shall I dare these real ills to hide 

In tinsel trappings of poetic pride ?" 

In this spirit he describes the barren coast 
of East Suffolk, not then the haunt of the 
holiday-maker and the golfer, but the battle- 
ground of the smuggler and the preventive 
men, the home of — 

"A bold and artful, surly, savage race, 
Who only skilled to take the finny tribe, 
The yearly dinner, or septennial bribe; 
Wait on the shore, and, as the waves run high, 
On the tossed vessel bend their eager eye, 
Which to the coast directs its venturous way, 
Theirs, or the ocean's miserable prey." 

This description of the barren land about 
the coast well illustrates Crabbe's power of 
observation : 

"Lo, where the heath with withering brake grown o'er, 
Lends the light turf that warms the neighbouring poor; 
From thence a length of burning sand appears, 
Where the thin harvest waves its wither' d ears ; 
Rank weeds, that every art and care defy, 



54 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

Reign o'er the land, and rob the blighted rye ; 
There thistles stretch their prickly arms afar, 
And to the ragged infant threaten war; 
There poppies nodding, mock the hope of toil ; 
Here the blue bugloss paints the sterile soil; 
Hardy and high above the slender sheaf, 
The slimy mallow waves her silky leaf; 
O'er the young shoot the charlock throws a shade, 
And clasping tares cling round the sickly blade; 
With mingled tints the rocky coasts abound, 
And a sad splendour vainly shines around." 

We have already heard of the workhouse 
hospital and the "potent quack" who at- 
tended to the sick. Let us now listen to 
Crabbe's description of the young clergyman 
who ministered to the afflicted of his village : 

"A jovial youth, who thinks his Sunday task 

As much as God or man can fairly ask ; 

The rest he gives to loves and labours light, 

To fields the morning, and to feasts the night. 
* * * 

A sportsman keen, he shouts through half the day, 

And, skilled at whist, devotes the night to play." 

But I must reluctantly forbear to quote 
more from "The Village," and ask you to 
turn your attention to two passages in "The 



LECTURE II 55 

Borough," which show what sort of men 
lived in Crabbe's native town, and also 
indicate the power our author has in depict- 
ing two very different characters. 

I will take Peter Grimes, the fisherman, 
first. Grimes was one of those human mon- 
sters who delight in cruelty ; and the late 
eighteenth and early nineteenth century, 
to its shame, furnished victims for its exercise 
in workhouse apprentices. The guardians 
of the overflowing workhouses of London 
were accustomed to get rid of their superfluous 
numbers by binding children as apprentices 
to masters, who practically became the owners 
of the little victims they were paid to teach. 

"Peter had heard there were in London then — 
Still have their being ! — workhouse-clearing men, 
Who, undisturbed by feelings just or kind, 
Would parish-boys to needy tradesmen bind ; 
They in their want a trifling sum would take, 
And toiling slaves of piteous orphans make." l 

1 For this abominable system see Walpole, "History of England 
from 1815," vol. i, p. 163, and his quotations from Romilly and Yonge. 
Dickens, of course, alludes to the apprenticing of parish boys in 
"Oliver Twist." 



56 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

Grimes did several of these wretched boys 
to death by his cruelty, which was notorious 
in the borough, but the shocking thing was 
that nobody troubled to interfere. 

"None put the question : 'Peter, dost thou give 
The boy his food ? What, man ! the lad must live; 
Consider, Peter, let the child have bread, 
He'll serve thee better if he's stroked and fed.' 
None reasoned thus ; and some, on hearing cries, 
Said calmly, 'Grimes is at his exercise.'" 

At last Grimes, who seems to have been 
never quite sane in his brutality, went mad, 
and died raving at visions of his aged father 
and the boys he had done to death. 

More inviting is a picture of another fisher- 
man, the mayor of the borough : 

"He was a fisher from his earliest day, 
And placed his nets within the borough bay, 
Where, by his skates, his herrings, and his soles, 
He lived, nor dreamed of corporation doles." 

At last he saved £240 (#1200), and asked 
a friend what to do with it. The friend 
suggests "put it out on interest." 



LECTURE II 57 

"'Oh, but,' said Daniel, 'that's a dangerous plan, 
He may be robbed like any other man.'" 

The friend tells Daniel that he will be 

paid five per cent, every year. 

'"What good is that ?' quoth Daniel, 'for 'tis plain 
If part I take, there can but part remain.'" 

With great difficulty the principle of a 
mortgage is explained, and at last, 

"Much amazed was that good man. 'Indeed,' 
Said he, with gladdening eye, 'will money breed ? 
How have I lived ? I grieve with all my heart 
For my late knowledge of this precious art; 
Five pounds for every hundred will he give ? 
And then the hundred — I begin to live." 

Such was the simplicity of the good 
folk of Aldeburgh, and so little news of 
the great world reached the place that, 
when Crabbe, at the age of twenty-five or 
six, went to London in 1780, he had never 
heard of the genius and tragic fate of 
Chatterton. 

I shall pass over the terrible year our aspir- 
ant for fame spent in the Metropolis. It is 



58 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

a matter of personal pride to me to quote the 
following passage from the "Life": 

"The only acquaintance he had on entering London 
was a Mrs. Burcham, who had been in early youth a 
friend of Miss Elmy's, and who was now the wife of a 
linen-draper in Cornhill. This worthy woman and 
her husband received him with cordial kindness ; then 
invited him to make their house his home whenever 
he chose; and as often as he availed himself of this 
invitation he was treated with that frank familiarity 
which cancels the appearance of obligation." ("Life," 
by the Rev. G. Crabbe.) 

I am glad to think my great-grand-parents 
understood the duty of hospitality. 

At last, after a terrible struggle with 
poverty and the unsuccessful publication of 
a poem called "The Candidate," Crabbe, 
who had hitherto sought for a patron in 
vain, found one in Edmund Burke. It is 
said that the following lines, expressive of 
the writer's feelings on quitting Aldeburgh, 
satisfied Burke that his petitioner was a poet : 

"As on their neighbouring beach the swallows stand, 
And wait for favouring winds to leave the land, 



LECTURE II 59 

While still for flight the ready wing is spread, 

So waited I the favouring hour, and fled ; 

Fled from those shores where guilt and famine reign, 

And cried, 'Ah ! hapless they who still remain, 

Who still remain to hear the ocean roar, 

Whose greedy waves devour the lessening shore ; 

Till some fierce tide, with more imperious sway, 

Sweeps the low hut and all it holds away ; 

When the sad tenant weeps from door to door, 

And begs a poor protection from the poor.'" 

Burke selected two poems, "The Village" 
and "The Library," for publication. He 
introduced Crabbe to Fox, and also to Rey- 
nolds : the latter brought him to Dr. Johnson ; 
and when Burke heard that Crabbe desired 
to be ordained, he induced Dr. Yonge, Bishop 
of Norwich, to overlook his unacademic 
education, and to admit him to the ministry. 
Lord Thurlow, himself an East Anglian, 
had at first refused to receive Crabbe, but 
now treated him with much kindness, and 
gave him £100 (#500) ; so Crabbe returned to 
Aldeburgh a clergyman — a very different 
position from that which he had occupied on 



60 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

leaving — and was shortly summoned thence 
to be domestic chaplain to the Duke of Rut- 
land, on the recommendation of his firm 
friend, Mr. Burke. From the Duke's seat at 
Belvoir "The Village " was published, after 
it had been submitted to Burke and Johnson. 
Naturally Crabbe's sentiments about rustic 
happiness and virtue accorded with the views 
of the worthy doctor, but it is pleasing to 
remark the kindness which made him at the 
height of his fame labour to improve the 
work of the younger poet. Very characteristic 
are Johnson's corrections of Crabbe's manu- 
script. Here is how Crabbe writes at the 
commencement of "The Village" : 

"In fairer scenes, where peaceful pleasures spring, 
Tityrus the pride of Mantuan swains might sing : 
But charmed by him, or smitten with his views, 
Shall modern poets court the Mantuan muse ? 
From Truth and Nature shall we widely stray, 
Where fancy leads, or Virgil led the way ?" 

From Johnson's hands little remains un- 
changed : 



LECTURE II 61 

"On Mincio's banks in Caesar's bounteous reign, 
If Tityrus found the golden age again, 
Must sleepy bards the flattering dreams prolong 
Mechanick echoes of the Mantuan song ? 
From Truth and Nature shall we widely stray, 
Where Virgil, not where Fancy, leads the way ?" 

I cannot feel very certain myself that the 
poet or his corrector got the concluding line 
right. 

I must now pass somewhat hurriedly over 
a long period. In 1785 Crabbe published 
"The Newspaper," and for twenty-two years 
he settled down to his clerical duties and 
did not reappear as an author. He lived 
at Stathern and Muston in Leicestershire 
the happy, domestic life of a country clergy- 
man, returning to Suffolk when his wife 
inherited a share in the estate of her uncle, 
Mr. Tovell, at Parham. 

In 1807 Crabbe appeared once more as 
a poet with "The Parish Register," and from 
this time his fame was unquestioned. "The 
Borough" followed and then "The Tales." 



62 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

But I need not weary you with dates and 
details. A new generation arose to encourage 
Crabbe. His first poems had been hailed 
by Burke, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Johnson, 
and Fox ; his later by Scott, Byron, Lord 
Holland, and Rogers. His last days were 
spent in comfort and comparative affluence 
at Trowbridge, to which he had been 
appointed by a later Duke of Rutland. In 
1817 he was lionised in London, and in 1822 
he paid his famous visit to Edinburgh and 
found Sir Walter Scott in the midst of that 
preposterous pageant in which the King 
and Sir William Curtis, Alderman of the City 
of London, delighted the Scottish nation 
by appearing at Holyrood, tremendous in 
Stewart tartan, with claymore, philabeg, and 
other accessories of the garb of old Gaul. 
Scott, unwearied by his efforts to organise 
the King's visit, had time to welcome a 
brother poet, and it will be remembered 
that so delighted was he to greet one whose 



LECTURE II 63 

writings had so often occupied his attention 
that he sat down on the sacred glass out of 
which George IV had deigned to drink, with 
the natural result. 1 Crabbe lived on till Feb- 
ruary, 1832, passing away, full of years and 
honours, in the seventy-eighth year of his age. 
Crabbe's works are sufficient to fill seven 
volumes, and it is not possible to do more 
than endeavour to form an estimate of him 
by limiting oneself to a few topics. I must 
content myself with three, and I fear that 
even then I cannot do justice to these. Those 
I propose are : 

I. Crabbe as reflecting the manners of 
his age. 

II. As a delineator of character. 

III. His place as a poet. 

I. I have spoken of Crabbe's scientific 
education — such as it was — and of his 
power of observation, and I find, even in 

1 Lockhart's "Life of Scott." Huchon points out several obvious 
discrepancies. " George Crabbe," etc., p. 435. 



64 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

later life, more of the doctor than the parson. 
It is for this reason that his work is of more 
value than that of greater poets in reflecting 
his age. For Crabbe was not one of those 
who let "fancy lead the way," but dealt with 
sober realities of experience, and even re- 
frained from generalising or theorising. For 
the religious life of the period Crabbe's 
poems are an invaluable document of which 
historians have, I suggest, made too little 
use. There is no reason to suppose that our 
author took Orders simply to secure literary 
leisure. His early diaries prove him a most 
devout man, and the fact that he occupied 
himself twenty-two years in parish work, 
without publishing, shows his devotion to 
his profession. Yet he apparently saw no 
harm in accepting two livings in Dorset- 
shire from the Lord Chancellor, which he 
scarcely ever went near, but took other work 
in the Vale of Belvoir. Nor did he feel any 
compunctions later in leaving his parishes 



LECTURE II 65 

in the Midlands to the care of a non-resident 
clergyman in order to live on his wife's prop- 
erty in Suffolk ; and he evidently considered 
the then Duke of Rutland unduly slow in 
providing for him. He was not always 
popular with his parishioners. This was 
not unnatural at Aldeburgh, where he had 
been known under less prosperous circum- 
stances, but he met with a good deal of 
opposition when, after his long residence in 
Suffolk, he returned to Muston ; and at 
Trowbridge he was at first considered too 
worldly for his flock, and only slowly won 
their sincere respect. A strict moralist, he 
had no dislike of social pleasure, and as a 
staunch Whig he shrank from enthusiasm of 
every kind. The serious and the profane 
alike distrusted him. The worldly remon- 
strated at his description of the workhouse 
chaplain, to which allusion has been made, and 
in deference to the complaints of the religious 
world the vigorous lines in "The Library": 



66 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

"Calvin grows gentle in this silent coast, 
Nor finds a single heretic to roast," 

make way for a weaker couplet with a half 
line plagiarised from Dryden : 

"Socinians here and Calvinists abide 
And thin partitions angry chiefs divide." 

Let us consider the clergy and religious 
teachers generally as he describes them. 

I can only allude to the five rectors, whom 
old Dibble, the village clerk in the "Parish 
Register," remembered. First comes "Good 
Master Addle," who 

"Filled the seven-fold surplice fairly out," 

and "dozing died" ; Next was Parson Peele, 
whose favourite text was "I will not 
spare you," and with "piercing jokes, and 
he'd a plenteous store," raised the tithes 
all round. Dr. "Grandspear" followed 
Peele, a man who never stinted his "nappy 
beer," and whom even cool Dissenters 
wished and hoped that a man so kind, 



LECTURE II 67 

"A way to heaven, though not their own, 
might find." After him came the "Author 
Rector" — 

"Careless was he of surplice, hood and band, 
And kindly took them as they came to hand." 

He was succeeded by the young man from 
Cambridge, assailed in his youth by a "clam- 
orous sect," who preached "conviction" so 
violently that "Our best sleepers started as 
they slept." 

But says old Dibble : 

"Down he sank upon his wretched bed 
And gloomy crotchets filled his wandering head." 

And it is on this point that Crabbe is so illu- 
minating as to the spirit of his age. His 
difficulties as a clergyman were due rather 
to the fanaticism than to the indifference of 
his flock. In " Sir Eustace Grey," a very 
powerful description of a madman who finds 
religious peace at last, the poet concludes, — 

"But, Ah ! though time could yield relief 
And soften woes it cannot cure; 



68 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

Would we not suffer pain and grief 

To have our reason sound and sure ? 
Then let us keep our bosoms pure 

Our fancies' favourite flights suppress ; 
Prepare the body to endure, 

And bend the mind to meet distress, 
And then His Guardian care implore, 

Whom demons dread and men adore." 

As the doctor recommends a moderate 
and temperate life as the best preventive of 
disease, and distrusts strong remedies and 
universal panaceas, so Crabbe (true to the 
best medical tradition) regards the pastoral 
work of healing the soul. Tolerant in most 
respects, he is severe on what the eighteenth 
century styled "enthusiasm," and on senti- 
mentalism in religion generally. 

Thus, in "The Borough " we have in the 

letter on religious sects a description of the 

contempt the Calvinistic Methodists had 

for Church teaching : 

"Hark to the Churchman ; day by day he cries : 
Children of men, be virtuous, be wise, 
Seek patience, justice, temp'rance, meekness, truth, 
In age be courteous, be sedate in youth, — 



LECTURE II 69 

So they advise, and when such things be read, 
How can we wonder that their flocks are dead ?" 

This "cauld morality," as Scott makes Mr. 
Trumbull call it in "Redgauntlet," is con- 
trasted with a really rousing sermon : 

"Further and further spread the conquering word 
As loud he cried — 'the Battle of the Lord.' 
Ev'n those apart who were the sound denied, 
Fell down instinctive, and in spirit died. 
Nor stayed he yet — his eye, his frown, his speech, 
His very gesture, had a power to teach; 
With outstretch'd arms, strong voice, and piercing call 
He won the field and made the Dagons fall ; 
And thus in triumph took his glorious way, 
Through scenes of horror, terror, and dismay." 

Crabbe often found his work hindered by 
a sort of fatalistic quietism which gave no 
hope to the "unconverted," even when they 
sought the aid of the minister of religion. 
In "Abel Keene" we have the story of a 
merchant's clerk who abandoned his faith, 
and then in days of poverty came for help : 

"Said the good man, 'and then rejoice therefore: 
'Tis good to tremble : prospects then are fair, 
When the lost soul is plunged in just despair. 



70 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

Once thou wert simply honest, just and pure, 
Whole as thou thought'st, and never wish'd a cure 



'What must I do,' I said, 'my soul to free ?' 

'Do nothing, man — it will be done for thee.' — 

'But must I not, my reverend guide, believe ?' 

'If thou art call'd thou wilt the faith receive :' — 

' But I repent not.' — Angry he replied, 

'If thou art call'd thou need'st naught beside: 

Attend on us, and if 'tis Heaven's decree 

The call will come — if not, ah, woe ! for thee.'" 

Crabbe had very little toleration for spiritual 
valetudinarians. He liked a good practical 
Christianity and was a little inclined to class 
the overscrupulous with the malades ima- 
ginaires. In "The Gentleman Farmer" we 
have a cleverly told story of a man of prop- 
erty, a professed atheist and an avowed 
enemy of priests and doctors. At last he fell 
ill ; and his artful housekeeper, the meek 
Rebecca, produces a Scotch cousin, Dr. Mollet. 
He is so successful that Rebecca decides 
to allow the Rev. Mr. Whisp, a converted 
ostler, to advise her master. Mollet and 



LECTURE II 71 

Whisp between them point out that it is his 
duty to marry Rebecca. Then the three 
batten happily on their victim : 

"Mollet his body orders, Whisp his soul, 
And o'er his purse the lady takes control." 

Though Crabbe lived in the days of the 
French Revolution and Tom Paine, infidelity 
seems to have given him far less trouble 
than the enthusiasm of his parishioners. 
In "The Learned Boy" we have the tale of 
a precocious lad such as our poet detested, 
a mean little creature, neat and docile at 
school, to whom much could be taught 
because he could imitate without reflecting : 

"He thought not much indeed — but what depends 
On pains and care, was at his fingers' ends." 

As it was impossible to make such a lad 
into a farmer like his honest father, he was 
sent to an office in town and picked up some 
up-to-date views of the Bible from a brother- 
clerk. On his return he thus explained his 



72 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

views to his grandmother, much to the dear 
old lady's distress : 

"I myself began 
To feel disturbed and to my Bible ran ; 
I now am wiser — yet agree in this, 
The book has things that are not much amiss; 
It is a fine old work, and I protest 
I hate to hear it treated as a jest; 
The book has wisdom in it, if you look 
Wisely upon it as another book." 

The father, overhearing his hopeful son, 
treats him to a long discourse, driven home 
with a cartwhip, and concluding : 

"Teachers men honour, learners they allure; 
But learners teaching of contempt are sure; 
Scorn is their certain meed, and smart their only cure." 

I have dealt hitherto with the subject 
of religion as showing how Crabbe can be 
used to illustrate his age. For politics I 
may refer to the witty tale of "The Dumb 
Orators" ; for social life to "Amusements 
in the Borough," and to "Clelia" and "Bla- 
ney" in the same collection. 



LECTURE II 73 

II. In the biography the son writes with 
much discrimination of his father's genius : 

"Whatever truth there may be in these lines (from 
"The Learned Boy," disparaging order), it is certain 
that this insensibility to the beauty of order was a defect 
in his own mind; arising from what I must call his 
want of taste. . . . This view of his mind is, I must 
add, confirmed by his remarkable indifference to al- 
most all the proper objects of taste. He had no real 
love for painting, for music, for architecture, or for 
what a painter's eye considers as the beauties of a 
landscape. But he had a passion for science — the 
science of the human mind first — ," etc. 

I believe that in delineation of character 
Crabbe is an artist indeed, worthy to rank 
with Jane Austen and the Brontes, and 
perhaps even more subtle than these ladies. 
He was not without a certain cynicism, 
and his powers of critical observation were 
great. He draws the drunken old reprobate 
in "The Borough," the magnificent "Sir 
Denys Brand," the gentle, suffering "Ellen 
Orford," the University don in "Schools," 
with masterly skill. I can only indicate his 



74 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

power in this respect by a few inadequate 
quotations. 

The sketches of the characters in the alms- 
houses in "The Borough" I commend to 
you as masterpieces. Clelia and Blaney had 
come down in life, and were without much ex- 
cuse. They had been jobbed into the institu- 
tion by Sir Denys Brand, and his words at the 
meeting of trustees throw a world of light on 
the baronet's character. Of Blaney he says : 

""Tis true/ said he, 'the fellow's quite a brute — 
A very beast ; but yet, with all his sin, 
He has a manner — let the devil in.'" 

Of Clelia : 

"'With all her faults,' he said, 'the woman knew 
How to distinguish — had a manner, too, 
And, as they say, she is allied to some 
In decent station — let the creature come." 3 

But though these two are powerfully drawn, 
Crabbe expends more care and skill in depict- 
ing Benbow, who had been 

"a jovial trader; men enjoyed 
The night with him : the day was unemployed." 



LECTURE II 75 

Benbow, whenever he could find an audi- 
ence, used to dilate on "The men of might 
to mingle strong drink," whom he had 
known. There was Squire Asgill, whose 
manor house was a disgrace and scandal to 
the countryside. It is needless to partic- 
ularise. I can explain best by saying that 
his life was that of Sir Pitt Crawley in his 
later days, only he was more hospitable 
and generous. Let us see the worthy squire 
at his best, in church : 

"His worship ever was a churchman true, 
He held in scorn the methodistic crew; 
May God defend the Church and save the King, 
He'd pray devoutly and divinely sing. 
Admit that he the holy day would spend 
As priests approved not, still he was a friend ; 
Much then I blame the preacher as too nice 
To call such trifles by the name of vice ; 
Hinting, though gently and with cautious speech, 
Of good example — 'tis their trade to preach. 

* * * 

A weaker man, had he been so reviled, 
Had left the place — he only swore and smiled." 



76 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

A still greater hero of Benbow's was Cap- 
tain Dowling, who was ready to drink against 
any rival : 

"Man after man they from the trial shrank, 
And Dowling ever was the last that drank." 

But we must leave the old reprobate, and 
go on to a far subtler delineation of char- 
acter. Sir Denys Brand, to use Crabbe's 
own words, was "maybe too highly placed 
for an author, who seldom ventures above 
middle life to delineate." It is admitted 
that Sir Denys was a real person, and the 
biographer withholds his name out of con- 
sideration for his family. 1 It must be remem- 
bered that Crabbe's nature was both proud 
and sensitive, and the scathing satire he 
expends on Sir Denys was probably provoked 
by some real or fancied slight. 

1 He is said to have been "Challoner Arcedekne, who built Glever- 
ing Hall," near Parham. Huchon, "George Crabbe," etc., p. 309. 
The bitterness of the satire lies in the little known fact that at the 
time the family of Arcedekne was not in the eighteenth century 
reckoned among the old county families : their fortune having been 
recently acquired in the East Indies. 



LECTURE II yy 

He is one of the trustees of the almshouses. 
He took the office — 

"True 'twas beneath him; but to do men good 
Was motive never by his heart withstood." 

Sir Denys is an aristocratic prig of the 
first water, and Crabbe hated prigs. He is 
one of those men who can be, with a certain 
amount of truth, described as possessing all 
the virtues : 

"In him all merits were decreed to meet, 
Sincere though cautious, frank and yet discreet, 
Just all his dealings, faithful every word, 
His passions' master and his temper's lord." 

His benevolence was splendid, and known 
to all men : 

"He left to meaner minds the simple deed, 
By which the houseless rest, the hungry feed ; 
His was a public bounty, vast and grand, 
'Twas not in him to work with viewless hand. 

He the first lifeboat plann'd ; to him the place 
Is deep in debt — 'twas he revived the race." 

Yet nobody liked him — 



78 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

" 'Twould give me joy [says Crabbe] some gracious deed 
to meet 
That has not called for glory in the street; 
Who felt for many, could not always shun, 
In some soft moment to be kind to one ; 
And yet they tell us, when Sir Denys died, 
That not a widow in the borough cried." 

III. Perhaps it may be said that the sub- 
ject of my lecture was after all rather a 
commonplace old gentleman, and if what 
I have said leaves this view, it is because I 
have failed to convey the effect which the 
study of his works has left upon me. He 
certainly made a great impression in his 
time, and was hailed as a true poet in an 
age of poets Nor is an age always wrong 
when it acclaims a man in whom posterity 
sees little merit. To compare Crabbe with 
Byron as a poet would be as absurd as to 
place his little stories on a level with the 
romances of Scott, whether in prose or verse. 
But in his own time men rated him very 
highly, and this is the more remarkable 



LECTURE II 79 

because he was essentially a man of the 
eighteenth century, who achieved his reputa- 
tion in the nineteenth. He saturated him- 
self in Pope and Dryden, and the wits of a 
bygone age, and never conformed to the 
taste of his own. The romantic movement, 
much as he admired Scott's writings, never 
influenced Crabbe nor does he seem to have 
been affected by the Lake Poets. He was 
simply himself: simple-minded if sensitive, 
full of courage, and with a quiet dignity 
of his own. Unworldly, yet remarkably 
shrewd, curiously blind to the beauties of 
Nature and of art, yet wonderfully alive to 
the marvels of the world and the pathos of 
life. Stern and uncompromising as a realist, 
he lacked neither sympathy nor imagina- 
tion, and possessed a saving sense of descrip- 
tive humour. Lord Thurlow said of him, 
"He's as like Parson Adams as twelve to a 
dozen, by G — d," and he has much of the 
winning simplicity of Fielding's charming 



80 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

clerical creation. And yet he had the ele- 
vation of character and the genius with fear- 
less hand to tear the veil which hid the lives 
of the poor from their richer neighbours, 
to expose the cruelty, injustice, and rapacity 
of an age which for all its greatness was 
singularly callous and unsympathetic of weak- 
ness and suffering ; and Crabbe may take 
his place not only with the poets of his time, 
but with the Clarksons, the Howards, the 
Frys, and the good men and women who 
succeeded in inaugurating an era of practical 
humanity. We need not grudge him the 
generous commendation of the greatest among 
his contemporary poets — 

"Nature's sternest painter and her best." 



LECTURE III 
Margaret Catchpole 

May I invite you to-day to a remote 
corner of England and ask you to associate 
with rather humble folk ? Our heroine is a 
servant maid ; her romance is her love for a 
smuggler and the faithful affection of a young 
farmer. The greatest personages to whom 
I shall introduce you are a Suffolk brewer 
and his worthy lady and uncommonly nu- 
merous family, one of whom was my grand- 
father. Yet it is almost impossible to imag- 
ine that men alive within our memory should 
have shared even as young children in the 
scenes I have to describe — the lawlessness 
of the country, the wild acts recorded, the 
stilted language employed by the chief actors. 
The strange callousness of the criminal code, 

G 81 



82 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

the very piety displayed by some of the prin- 
cipal characters, are completely out of date 
and almost incomprehensible. The author 
himself of this true romance, though he only 
died in 1877, evidently wrote and thought 
in ways quite alien to those now in vogue. 

I shall continue what I have said about 
Crabbe by attempting briefly to describe 
the county of Suffolk (the South-folk), which 
must occupy our attention during this lec- 
ture. I do so with no apology, for I believe 
that many a New England family tree springs 
from roots deeply embedded in its soil. 

One thing realised by every child born 
in East Anglia is that he is not one of those 
inferior people who are born in the " Shires." 
His native land is not called after any town, 
Northampton, Bedford, Leicester, or Cam- 
bridge : he belongs to a race, not to a terri- 
torial division, invented less than a thousand 
years ago. He and his kinsmen, the North 
folk, are East Anglians ; and the rest of the 



LECTURE III 83 

world are to him "furriners," or people who 
came from the " Sheeres." Not that he is 
an unmixed race — far from it. The peasan- 
try were in the land long before the Angles 
arrived. They are a small dark people, 
who have survived countless invasions and 
will probably outlive modern civilisation. 
When you see them beating a field or covert 
for game and kill hares and rabbits by throw- 
ing their sticks with unerring aim, you feel 
that they do much as their ancestors did 
before the dawn of history. The Anglian 
is a big blond man slow of speech and 
apparently somewhat dull, but in a bargain 
he is seldom the loser. The little town of 
Hadleigh was once the capital of Alfred's 
rival, Guthrum, the Dane ; and the Norse 
origin of many families reveals itself in Grim- 
wood, Grimwade, Grimsey, and Grimes. 
Flemings and Dutch, French Huguenots, have 
all contributed to the population of East 
Anglia ; but despite the blending of nation- 



84 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

alities there is a strong feeling of a common 
tie binding all these heterogeneous elements 
together. Yet there are curious local divi- 
sions existing to this day. The eastern and 
western parts of the county are at constant 
feud. When the county councils were estab- 
lished in the ' eighties,' Suffolk had to be 
divided into East and West, because the 
two would not work together. When last 
year the county was made a single diocese, 
Ipswich would not allow the ancient west- 
ern monastic town of Bury St. Edmunds 
to give the bishop his title ; and Bury St. 
Edmunds scorned to submit to the richer 
but less aristocratic Ipswich. So in desper- 
ation the diocese had to be called ' St. Ed- 
mundsbury and Ipswich.' 

To look at an Ordnance map one would 
say that Suffolk was very flat and eminently 
agricultural. The highest hill I could find 
was 402 feet above the sea ; seldom does the 
land rise over 200 feet. Yet a motor drive 



LECTURE III 85 

in Suffolk gives one the sensation of having 
been on a switchback railway. One is never 
on the level, and some of the little ascents 
and descents are very sharp. The beautiful 
church towers are usually on hills and the 
churches are often placed outside the villages. 
The road or ' street ' (Roman stratum) on each 
side of which the hamlet stands frequently runs 
up a hill. The lanes are narrow and muddy ; 
and at the bottom of a hill often waterlogged. 
Communication must have been exceedingly 
difficult — a fact which explains many pecu- 
liarities of the people. 

Nowhere is there a sharper line drawn 
by nature in the county than between the 
agricultural land in the centre and the coast. 
Rarely do the corn lands reach the sea. A 
belt of breezy commons, bright with gorse, 
extends almost from Lowestoft to Ipswich, 
and a glance at the map shews how thin 
the population is. Only by branch lines 
of recent construction does the railway reach 



86 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

the Suffolk coast. Cut off by a wild tract 
of commons and marshes, the inhabitants 
of the little ports formed strangely isolated 
communities, and regarded with no friendly 
eye the villagers of the interior, marrying 
only among themselves and keeping care- 
fully apart. A brief survey of the coast 
throws a light on the character of the people. 
All along the shore the five fathom line, 
sometimes half a mile, sometimes as much 
as three miles from the shore, marks the 
continual encroachment of the North Sea. 
Towns like Aldeburgh and Dunwich, once 
standing a mile or more from the shore, are 
now, as in the case of the first, threatened 
by the waves ; or, like Dunwich, once a fa- 
mous seaport, almost entirely washed away 
and submerged. Occasionally, as from Alde- 
burgh to Orford, the sea makes its own 
breakwater by casting up long banks of 
shingle, and even now, for nearly ten miles, 
save for coastguard stations and lighthouses, 



LECTURE III 87 

the Suffolk foreshore is absolutely unin- 
habited. 

One of the most striking features of the 
coast is the inland tidal rivers. In the 
south are the Stour and the Orwell, which 
converge at the important harbour of Har- 
wich ; and at the head of the tidal waters 
of the Orwell is Ipswich. The river itself 
when the tide is high is a most beautiful 
estuary with parks and woods sloping down 
to the water — Stoke Park, Wherstead Park, 
Woolverstone on the south, Alnesbourn 
Priory and Orwell Park on the north. A 
few miles north of the estuary of the Orwell 
and Stour is the river Deben, which culmi- 
nates inland at Woodbridge and was the 
scene of many a solitary boating expedition 
by the famous translator of Omar Khayyam, 
Edward Fitzgerald. Then comes the shingle 
bank I have spoken of, parting the river 
Ore from the sea, as far as Slaughden, when 
it turns inland and becomes the Aide, giving 



88 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

its name to Aldeburgh. Great salt marshes 
in many places fringe these rivers and im- 
part an air of desolation to the surrounding 
scenery. 

Rightly to appreciate this curious country 
we must divest ourselves of modern ideas, 
forget that we can be in London in two hours, 
ignore the fact that the commons have been 
turned into golf courses, that the people are 
occupied by letting lodgings, that their har- 
vest is the holiday season, and that we can 
motor on most of the roads in comfort. One 
must go back, and not so very far after all, 
to a time when it would have needed a guide 
to enable you to find Aldeburgh and the 
coast, and when you would have received 
the reverse of a hearty welcome from its 
inhabitants, "a surly race" who viewed 
strangers with "a suspicious eye," and no 
wonder, since they had the best of rea- 
sons for concealing "the way they got their 
wealth." You must transport yourself into 



LECTURE III 89 

this past, if you would wish to understand 
what the poet Crabbe has to tell you about 
his native place. 

I think I caught something of his spirit 
when I went to Aldeburgh to prepare myself 
for writing this lecture. It was on a chill 
December day, damp and cold with a north- 
east wind. I had had a cold for a week and 
it lay very heavily on my chest, so my spirits 
were the reverse of buoyant. Rain was 
falling as I made my way along the deserted 
High street and walked to Slaughden Quay, 
where Crabbe was born, and as a young man 
worked at rolling casks from the hookers 
to the stores. A " dirty sea " at low tide was 
breaking against the shingle bank, and on 
the other side was the valley of the Aide and 
dreary marshes stretching to the low uplands 
on the horizon. On the rising ground above 
the town rose the church tower of Aldeburgh ; 
and one could well imagine what a dreary 
home the desolate quay and the squalid 



90 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

little town must have been, when the only- 
approach was by the harbourless sea, or by 
sandy tracks over a bleak moor, or by the 
sluggish river winding through the marsh. 

The peculiarities of East Anglia, both 
inland and on the coast, are reflected in its 
inhabitants. It is a country which by its 
isolation has fostered strong originality in 
all classes, manifesting itself frequently in 
a species of coarseness of fibre and sensi- 
bility. The people have not a character for 
high intelligence, at any rate in Suffolk, 
where "silly" is the epithet applied to the 
county. Despite this fact perhaps no part 
of Great Britain has produced so many 
"worthies" of the highest order. In almost 
every one of these the " animal" is very strong 
and the intelligence is dominated by practical 
considerations. Suffolk and Norfolk respec- 
tively have bred perhaps the two greatest 
of English statesmen — Cardinal Wolsey and 
Sir Robert Walpole. Wolsey impressed his 



LECTURE III 91 

contemporaries by his native force and arro- 
gance ; and Bishop Creighton explains in 
his biography of him how sane a view he 
took of his country's position in regard 
to the politics of Europe. Walpole, with 
the tastes of a boorish squire, little deli- 
cacy of mind, and a cynical contempt for 
mankind, was an unrivalled financier and 
minister in days of material prosperity. In 
the forefront among the pioneers of English 
science stands the famous Suffolk name of 
Bacon. In his great achievements and his 
equally serious faults Francis Bacon, Vis- 
count Verulam, is an East Anglian. His 
luminous mind is seen in the singularly 
lucid English in which his thoughts are 
expressed, his rough commonsense reveals 
itself in the way in which he brushes aside 
the speculative theories of the philosophers, 
and goes directly for results based on practi- 
cal experiment. And on the darker side, 
the unscrupulous way in which he crushed 



92 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

friend and foe alike in order to attain the 
position, which his genius entitled him to 
take in the country, discloses the same lack 
of sensibility which we frequently see in the 
East Anglian character. 

Among the great judges few take a higher 
place than Lord Thurlow. Scarcely anyone 
could inspire such fear by the mere force of 
his personality than he. Whether in the 
House of Lords, when he crushed the Duke of 
Grafton, who twitted him with being a novus 
homo; or in the law courts; or at his own 
table in private life, where, in his old age, 
he could make the greatest wits of the day 
retire in discomfiture, he shewed himself an 
antagonist to be dreaded. Yet, as Crabbe 
attests, under that rough exterior beat a kind 
heart. 

Not only the genius of Nelson, the son of 
a Norfolk Rector, as well as the moral fail- 
ure which cast a stain on the unparalleled 
lustre of his name, may be traceable to 



LECTURE III 93 

his native soil. Even to-day there is one 
to whom England looks with confidence, 
though his stern practical ability inspires 
but little affection, among whose proud 
and well-deserved titles is the name of 
his mother's home, an out-of-the-way Suf- 
folk village ; for on entering the peerage 
Earl Kitchener assumed the style of Baron 
Kitchener of Khartoum and Aspal. 1 

The force of character which produces 
great men is certain almost to manifest itself 
for evil also, and we recognise the truth of 
much of Crabbe's stern realism in the char- 
acters to which he introduces us. As Dr. 
Jessop, a singularly acute observer of the 
Norfolk villager, points out, the criminal 
annals of East Anglia disclose outbursts of 
remarkable ferocity on the part of its inhab- 
itants. Side by side with this vindictive 
spirit is a proneness to superstition, generally 
of a gloomy character. Aldeburgh has records 

1 The lecture was delivered March, 1916. 



94 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

of many portents and apparitions in its 
annals ; nowhere was the witch finder more 
active than in Suffolk; and, even in the 
later half of the nineteenth century, a woman 
suspected of being a witch was done to 
death in the neighbouring county of Essex. 
We have seen in Crabbe how what was then 
called "enthusiasm" in religion drove more 
than one of his characters into a despair of 
gloom. Not that there was not a great deal 
of genuine piety : the churches of East 
Anglia are the glory of the countryside, and 
many of the most magnificent are due to 
the liberality of its traders and manufacturers 
in the days when it was one of the industrial 
centres of English life. Indeed, it may not 
be merely local vanity which explains the 
contemptuous epithet "silly" as carrying 
with it not a slight but a compliment — the 
word being used in its older sense as the 
equivalent of the German selig, "pious." No- 
where did the Reformation obtain a stronger 



LECTURE III 95 

hold than in the diocese of Norwich ; and 
its roll of Protestant martyrs in the reign 
of Mary was exceptionally large. Force- 
fulness for good or evil, superstition, and 
genuine piety all play their part in the story 
I am now about to ask you to consider. 
The popularity in Suffolk of the life of Mar- 
garet Catchpole — though the literary merit 
of the book is not great — is a testimony 
that her tale strikes a sympathetic chord to 
this day. 

I must preface what I have to say by a 
few remarks about the author of the book. 
The Rev. Richard Cobbold was the son of 
John Cobbold, a wealthy brewer of the Cliff 
House, Ipswich, by his second wife, who plays 
so important a part in the story I am about 
to put before you. Mrs. Cobbold was a 
very remarkable woman, a friend of Sir 
Joshua Reynolds, an author of some repute ; 
and, what was most unusual at the time, an 
eloquent public speaker. She married Mr. 



96 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

Cobbold when he was a widower with four- 
teen children and had by him a large family 
herself — six sons and a daughter. Richard 
was the youngest son, being born in 1797 
and dying in his eightieth year in 1877. He 
was Rector of Wortham, a parish in the 
north of Suffolk, an author of repute in his 
day, highly respected as a devoted clergyman, 
a strong churchman, and a keen and active 
sportsman. In 1845 he brought out "Mar- 
garet Catchpole." In his preface he says : 
"The public may depend upon the truth of 
the main features of this narrative ; indeed, 
most of the facts recorded were matters of 
public notoriety at the time of their occur- 
rence. The author who details them is a 
son with whom this extraordinary female 
lived and from whose hands he received 
the letters and facts here given." The story 
of Margaret Catchpole told in the novel is 
briefly as follows : 

She was born at Nacton, a village not far 



LECTURE III 97 

from Ipswich, on what was then a somewhat 
desolate heath on the north bank of the 
Orwell. Her father was head ploughman 
to a farmer named Denton, a well-known 
breeder of Suffolk cart horses. From child- 
hood she was known as a good rider, and 
she obtained her first place as a servant by 
catching a very spirited pony of Mr. Den- 
ton's, whose wife was taken suddenly ill, 
and riding at a gallop to the town and through 
the streets crowded on a market day to fetch 
the doctor. As she had not had time to 
saddle or bridle her steed, she rode him bare- 
back with a halter to guide him — a really 
remarkable feat for a child of fourteen. As 
she grew up, she found a suitor in a clever 
sailor named William Laud, originally a 
boat builder, who had been a pupil in navi- 
gation, says the author, under a Mr. Crabbe, 
a brother of the poet's. 1 Laud's education 

1 This seems impossible from what is known of the Crabbe family. 
(See Huchon's "George Crabbe.") The poet had no brother who 
could have taught Laud. 
H 



98 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

and abilities seem to have been above his 
station in life, and had he been able to keep 
straight he would have risen to the command 
of a merchant ship, and possibly even to 
officer's rank in the Royal Navy. As it was, 
he attached himself to a man named Bar- 
good, an unscrupulous employer of smugglers, 
and became one of the leaders of that 
highly organized body which in the war with 
France was bent on defrauding the revenue. 
Laud's influence was singularly bad for the 
Catchpole family. Two brothers came to 
a bad end, another enlisted and disappeared 
for years, and the whole household fell un- 
der suspicion of being in league with the 
smugglers. 

Now comes the undoubted fiction in the 
story. Margaret Catchpole particularly re- 
quested that her husband's name should be 
concealed, if her adventures were ever pub- 
lished, in order that her children might not 
know she had been a convict. Consequently 



LECTURE III 99 

we must assume that the honest lover called 
John Barry of Levington, the parish next to 
Nacton, is fictitious, and probably that he and 
his brother Edward are introduced to heighten 
the romance. 1 Anyhow, in the story Laud 
was severely wounded by John's brother 
Edward, who commanded the preventive men 
on Felixstow Beach, and was supposed to 
have been killed. Margaret nursed Laud 
in his concealment into convalescence ; and 
later on when she was in service at a Mrs. 
Wake's he attempted to carry her off by 
violence. She was, however, protected by 
the faithful John Barry and a strange old 
fisherman nicknamed Robinson Crusoe. 
John Barry was seriously wounded. On his 
recovery he proposed to Margaret, who re- 
fused him ; and, in desperation, the rejected 

1 An example of Mr. Cobbold's local knowledge and the skill 
with which he weaves it into his story is seen in the fact that he makes 
the Barrys the sons of a farmer who first used crag shells for manure. 
In a Suffolk gazetteer, about 1855, I discovered that this had really 
been done at Levington, but in 1712, a generation or so before the 
Barrys could have appeared. 



100 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

lover emigrated to the Colony of New South 
Wales, Australia. 

In May, 1793, Margaret entered into ser- 
vice with Mrs. Cobbold of the ClifT, Ips- 
wich. The house still stands adjoining the 
well-known brewery on the shore of the 
river Orwell. Even to this day it lies 
at the fringe of the business part of Ips- 
wich, at the end of the docks and quays ; 
beyond it is country and the well-wooded 
banks of the beautiful river. The girl was 
under-nursemaid, and also helped the cook 
in the evening. She soon manifested excep- 
tional abilities ; for not only did she learn all 
the lessons which the children had to pre- 
pare, but on three occasions she saved the 
life of members of Mrs. Cobbold's large 
family. She rescued two little boys, George 
and Frederick (the latter my grandfather), 
from the fall of a wall, which would inevitably 
have crushed them ; she saved another, 
Henry, in Ipswich, when he had fallen into 



LECTURE III 101 

deep water ; and when an older boy, named 
William, had gone alone down the Orwell 
to shoot ducks and his boat had been over- 
turned, it was by her courage and resource 
that the lad was recovered in a state of 
insensibility. On the latter occasion Laud 
reappears suddenly. He had been pressed 
into the Navy and was now necessarily 
leading a more reputable life, and Margaret 
could avow her partiality for her lover 
without shame. In 1794 Laud fought in 
Lord Howe's victory of the 1st of June and 
apparently distinguished himself highly in 
the action, being one of the crew entrusted 
with bringing home a valuable prize. In 
the story Laud is represented as a man 
naturally with good impulses, but weak and 
unstable ; and the villain of the piece is the 
sailor who was Laud's mate in his smuggling 
days — one Luff. 

Luff was determined to get Laud back to 
the smuggling business ; Laud, on the contrary, 



102 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

desired to lead a virtuous life with Margaret. 
Accordingly, when he was free of the navy, 
he brought his prize money and left it at 
Mr. Cobbold's house, but Margaret, who 
had now become cook and had got into 
trouble by entertaining too many sailors, 
refused to see her lover — of course not 
knowing it was he. Luff then turned up, 
and, as she refused to give him information 
about Laud, threw her into a well from which 
she was rescued with difficulty. Luff was 
killed soon after in a desperate encounter 
with the preventive men, and from what 
Margaret's brother Edward could gather 
Luff had murdered Laud. Margaret did 
not believe it ; but her conduct became so 
unsatisfactory from grief and disappoint- 
ment that Mrs. Cobbold, despite all she had 
done for the family, was compelled to dismiss 
her from her service. Laud in the mean- 
time had reformed and settled down as a 
boat builder, and on his uncle's death he 



LECTURE III 103 

came into the business. But the habit of 
smuggling was too strong, and he returned 
to his old courses. This brings us to the 
tragedy. Margaret has heard that Laud 
is alive from an old servant of the Cobbolds. 
She longs for an explanation and is deter- 
mined to see him. Instead of consulting 
any of her reputable friends she goes to 
Ipswich and is persuaded that Laud is in 
London waiting for her there. Even a letter 
from him is produced expressing his readiness 
'to marry her if she would join him. This 
clumsy fraud was devised by a man named 
Cook in order to induce Margaret, whose 
fame as a rider was known to him, to steal a 
horse from Mr. Cobbold, and to ride him up 
to London. Regardless of the consequences, 
Margaret took her old master's best horse, 
named Rochford, and rode him to London, 
seventy miles, in eight hours. Of course the 
loss of the horse was known at once, and hand- 
bills were issued offering a reward. Mar- 



104 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

garet, dressed as a groom, was arrested soon 
after her arrival in London, and sent back 
to Ipswich to be tried at the Assizes. On 
August 9, 1797, she pleaded guilty at Bury 
St. Edmunds and was condemned to death. 
Her crime was then considered a most seri- 
ous one, but she made a very favourable 
impression, and the witnesses for character 
gave such good testimony that the judge 
commuted the death sentence to one of 
transportation for seven years. For three 
years Margaret remained in Ipswich gaol ; 
and it is probable that her sentence would 
have been remitted altogether but for what 
ensued. 

Laud was now smuggling on a large scale. 
He was deeply concerned with an affair 
in which two preventive men were beaten 
and thrown into the sea at Southwold for 
reporting that they had seen forty carts 
and horses ready to take a cargo which was 
to be "run" near Dunwich. A reward of 



LECTURE III 1 05 

£100 for his apprehension was offered in 
the newspapers on March 2d, 1799. Shortly 
after this 880 gallons of gin were seized and 
the guilt of smuggling it brought home to 
Laud. All his property was confiscated and 
he was given a year's imprisonment and 
sentenced to pay £100. He was committed 
to Ipswich gaol, and would have to stay 
there after his sentence had expired till the 
fine was paid. Of course Margaret, whose 
good conduct had made her practically free 
of the prison, discovered that her lover was 
an inmate ; and, as she had kept intact 
the prize money he had given her, she was 
able to give him the means of obtaining his 
liberation at the end of his year's imprison- 
ment. Laud persuaded her to try to escape 
and join him, and the way she did this is one 
of the most extraordinary in her romantic 
career. The wall of the prison was twenty- 
five feet high and protected at the top with 
iron spikes. Margaret succeeded in getting a 



106 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

flower stand, which placed endways raised her 
to within thirteen feet of the top. She had 
made herself a garment like a shepherd's 
smock and a pair of trousers so as to be 
unincumbered in her movements. By cast- 
ing a clothes-line over the chevaux-de-frise 
on the top of the wall she managed to climb 
up to the iron spikes. Then, lowering the 
line on the other side, she turned over between 
the revolving spikes and let herself down on 
the opposite side. She and Laud made for a 
place called Sudbourn ; but were overtaken 
on the beach where, after a desperate fight, 
Laud was killed by Edward Barry, and 
Margaret arrested and taken back to the gaol. 
It was one of the strange anomalies of the 
cruel law of that age that whereas ruffians 
like Cook, and desperados like Laud escaped 
the capital sentence, comparatively innocent 
persons were hanged without mercy. For 
a reprieved person to escape from prison was 
death, and, though Margaret was ignorant 



LECTURE III 107 

of the terrible penalty which she had incurred, 
there seemed no hope of her meeting with 
any further leniency. She was again brought 
before the same judge, Lord Chief Baron 
Sir Archibald Macdonald, who had con- 
demned her in August, 1797, on the third 
day of the same month in 1800. Again 
she pleaded guilty, and when the judge 
condemned her in very stern language she 
made a short speech accepting his sentence, 
which impressed everyone present in the 
court house. Her eloquence and her whole 
demeanour profoundly impressed the judge, 
and again he obtained power to respite her, 
sentencing her this time to lifelong trans- 
portation. 

Throughout her trials Margaret found in 
Mrs. Cobbold a constant friend, one who 
never allowed her for a moment to feel for- 
saken. The letters which passed between 
her and her former mistress are preserved, 
and on reading them one cannot but fail 



108 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

to note how in style and diction the maid 
had been influenced by Mrs. Cobbold. Mar- 
garet continued to write from Australia, and 
her letters are marvellous when one con- 
siders her antecedents and lack of early 
education. She collected specimens to send 
to her mistress, some of which were presented 
to the Ipswich Museum. Once more she 
was able to save life by an act of desperate 
daring, from which the men shrank, at the 
time of a flood. At last, according to the 
story, "John Barry," who had prospered 
in the colony, found that she was there, sought 
her out, and married her. The last letter 
published in the book is dated June 25th, 1812, 
and announces her marriage to John Barry. 
It contains these words : " Should you ever 
think fit, as you once hinted in your letter 
to me, to write my history, or to leave it 
to others to publish, you have my free per- 
mission at my decease, whenever that shall 
take place, to do so. But let my husband's 



LECTURE III 109 

name be concealed, change it, change it to 
any other ... for mine and my children's 
sake." She died September 10th, 1841, in 
the sixty-eighth year of her age. 

The book raises problems of exceptional 
literary interest. In the first place, it was 
written by a man of unimpeachable char- 
acter, who wrote with a distinctly religious 
aim, in view mainly to shew that the heroine 
after having violated "the laws of God 
and man" became by "the inculcation of 
Christian faith and virtue conspicuous for 
the sincerity of her reformation." He avers 
that his narrative is strictly true and based 
on facts "well known to many persons of 
the highest respectability still living" and 
that he himself received the letters he quotes. 
He has no motive for deviating from his 
intention to tell the truth except that, as 
we have seen, Margaret Catchpole desired 
her married name to be concealed. That 
the author studiously carried out this natural 



no SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

wish is proved by the fact that a wealthy 
lady in New South Wales, named Mrs. Reiby, 
who had left Bury in Lancashire as a girl, 
was declared to be the true Margaret Catch- 
pole, to her great annoyance, as she naturally 
had no desire to figure as a "convict heroine." 
In 19 10 the story of Margaret was drama- 
tised in London and acted by the late 
Mr. Laurence Irving and his wife. A corre- 
spondence thereupon appeared in the East 
Anglian Daily Times in which it was hinted 
that Mrs. Reiby, a Staffordshire girl, was 
transported in 1791 for the same offence of 
horse stealing. 1 

No one can read the book without per- 
ceiving that all the conversations are ficti- 
tious. Mr. Cobbold was no Shakespeare, 
and he makes all his characters talk in the 

1 The case of horse stealing tried in Lancashire in 1791 was a 
peculiarly hard one. A young lady of good family was condemned 
to transportation for mounting a stranger's horse, having been dared 
to do so by a friend. She was only fourteen years of age ! She was 
apparently sent to Australia rather as a passenger than a convict; 
and married the captain of the ship. 



LECTURE III in 

same style as (if report be true) he conversed 
himself. The whole of the Barry incidents 
may be fictitious ; for if the details given were 
true, everybody in Suffolk must have known 
who Margaret's husband was. The father 
of Edmund and John "Barry" was the dis- 
coverer of crag shells as manure and was 
a farmer and miller at Levington Hill, the 
next parish to Nacton. But even then the 
author may have used pardonable license. 
Still the last letter of Margaret's which the 
author declares he received from his mother 
cannot be genuine. It is signed Margaret 
"Barry," and it says expressly that she was 
married to the man who had loved her fruit- 
lessly when the family lived at Nacton. In 
point of fact Margaret never married. 

Had the book been a document written 
many centuries ago, there would be suggested 
grave doubts whether such a woman ever 
existed ; as it is, the Cobbold family have 
lived in Ipswich in unbroken succession dur- 



112 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

ing the past century ; and documents, like 
the original gaol-delivery in 1797 and the 
exemption of Mr. Cobbold from any parish 
offices for arresting the culprit, prove beyond 
doubt the existence of Margaret Catchpole. 

As, however, the subject of these lectures 
is ' English social life,' I shall now give 
some extracts from the book before me, and 
from Crabbe's biography to shew how the 
peasantry lived in the late eighteenth and 
early nineteenth century. 1 

Even to this day if you enter a harvest 
field in Suffolk at reaping time you will 
hear the old Norman French demand for 
" Largess" and you will be expected to give it. 
Mr. Cobbold gives in his book a description 
of a harvest home, many features of which 
are still remembered. The farmer lodged all 
the single men in his house, but the married 
men (known as hinds) lived in the neighbour- 
ing cottages. When the last sheaf of corn 

1 See Appendix on the literary problem of Mr. Cobbold's novel. 



LECTURE III 113 

was conveyed to the stack-yard, the barn 
was covered with green leaves and the sheaf 
brought in with shouting and blowing of the 
harvest horn. The farmer then gave an 
ample supper to the labourers, and he, his 
wife, and daughters waited on their guests. 
The head man of the harvest field acted as 
"lord of the feast." The chief song was 
called "Hallo Largess," and was in honour 
of the division of the Largess obtained in 
harvest time among the reapers. Here is a 
verse of the song quoted by our author : 

" Now the ripening corn 
In the sheaves is borne, 
And the loaded wain 
Bring home the grain. 
The merry, merry reapers sing 
And jocund shouts the happy harvest hind 
Hallo Large, Hallo Large, Hallo Largess." 

"At evening when the work of the day is 
over," to quote from " Margaret Catchpole," 
"all the men collect in a circle, and Hallo, 
that is cry, "Largess." Three times they say 



114 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

in a low tone, "Hallo Large! Hallo Large! 
Hallo Large!" and all, hand in hand, bow 
their heads almost to the ground ; but after 
the third monotonous yet sonorous junction, 
they lift up their heads, and, with one burst 
of their voices, cry out "Gess." I cannot 
help wondering whether this semi-barbarous 
custom which prevailed in Suffolk survive 
in those marvellous yells in which the exuber- 
ant spirits of youth in the highly civilized 
universities of America now find a vent. 

Allusion has been made to the superstition 
of the East Anglian peasantry, and a most 
interesting example is given in Thomas Colson, 
better known in Ipswich as Robinson Crusoe, 
the fisherman on the Orwell. He had built 
a boat for himself of the strangest materials 
and was constantly at work on the river. 
His skill was wonderful, and he is described 
as a perfect fisherman, quiet, steady, active, 
and thoughtful. In character he was singu- 
larly benevolent, never refusing to help any- 



LECTURE III 115 

one in distress. To quote Mr. Cobbold : 
"The writer of these pages knew Colson 
well. He has often as a boy been in a boat 
with him, and always found him kind and 
gentle." 

The old man's mania was probably only 
an exaggeration of the belief of his time or 
at any rate of his youth. He was a firm 
believer in wizards and witchcraft. He fan- 
cied himself surrounded by evil spirits. He 
knew their names, their propensities, how 
they afflicted men, and his great study was 
to prevent their malign influence. His trust 
in charms was absolute, and his whole body 
was hung with amulets, rings, bones of 
horses, verses, etc., each of which he declared 
to be efficacious against a certain spirit. If 
he lost one of his many charms, he believed 
himself specially liable to attack by the 
demon, against whom it was a prophylactic. 
That he had learned much from folklore is 
evident from the fact that though often 



Il6 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

questioned about the different demons who 
tormented him, he never deviated from his 
ordinary account of them ; and no one ever 
found him tripping as to their names or attri- 
butes. Though subject to hallucinations, he 
must have learned his demonology somewhere ; 
and there seems to me little doubt that among 
the less educated folk in East Anglia there 
was, down to the end of the eighteenth cen- 
tury, a belief and a knowledge of the different 
powers of evil little different from that of 
the Middle Ages or the days when witch- 
craft was dreaded by all the inhabitants of 
England of every class. 1 

The primitive character of rural life at a 
comparatively late period is seen in the 
admirable description of Mr. Tovell's house 
in the Life of the Poet Crabbe, written by 
his son, which fully attests the accuracy of 
his younger contemporary — Mr. Cobbold. 

1 Mr. Cobbold in a private document says that Colson derived his 
knowledge of the names of demons from Glanvil's Sadducismus 
Triumphatus. I looked over the book and found no names of demons. 



LECTURE III 117 

Mr. Tovell, whose property Mrs. Crabbe 
inherited, was a yeoman farmer possessed 
of a very considerable freehold property 
whose income, £800 (#4000), for those days 
was considerable. A landowner of such com- 
parative wealth in the eighteenth century 
might well aspire to a place among the 
gentry of the county, but Mr. Tovell pos- 
sessed a sturdy independence which forbade 
him taking any position in which he might 
feel himself ill at ease. A yeoman he was 
by education and such he was determined to 
remain: "Jack," he said, "will never make 
a gentleman." Nevertheless, says Mr. 
Crabbe, he possessed a native dignity of 
his own. The following is a description of 
his and his worthy wife's menage at Parham. 
I quote somewhat at length. 

"His house was large and the surrounding 
moat, the rookery, the ancient dovecot, and 
the well-stored fishponds were such as might 
have suited a gentleman's seat of some 



Ii8 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

consequence ; but one side of the house 
immediately overlooked the farm-yard, full 
of all sorts of domestic animals and the 
scene of constant bustle and noise. On 
entering the house, there was nothing at first 
sight to remind one of the farm : a spacious 
hall paved with black and white marble, etc., 
etc. But the drawing room, a corresponding 
dining parlour, and a handsome sleeping 
apartment upstairs, were all tabooed ground, 
and made use of on great and solemn occasions 
only — such as rent days and an occasional 
visit with which Mr. Tovell was honoured 
by a neighbouring peer. At all other times 
the family and their visitors lived entirely 
in the old-fashioned kitchen along with the 
servants. My great-uncle occupied an arm 
chair. . . . Mrs. Tovell sat at a small table, 
on which, in the evening stood one small 
candle in an iron candlestick . . . ; in winter 
a noble block of wood, sometimes the whole 
circumference of a pollard, threw its com- 



LECTURE III 119 

fortable warmth and cheerful blaze over the 
whole apartment. 

"At a very early hour in the morning, the 
alarm called the maids and their mistress 
also : . . . After the important business 
of the dairy and a hasty breakfast, their 
respective employments were again resumed : 
that which the mistress took for her especial 
privilege being the scrubbing of the floors 
of the state-apartments." 

Once a new servant was found doing 
this, and thus spoke the good lady : " You 
wash such floors as these ? Give me the 
brush this instant and troop to the scullery 
and wash that, madam. ... As true as 
G — d's in heaven, here comes Lord Roch- 
ford to call on Mr. Tovell. Here, take my 
mantle (a blue woollen apron), and I'll go to 
the door." 

The family dined together — the heads 
sat at the old kitchen table — the maids 
at a side table, called a bouter, the farm men 



120 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

stood in the scullery. With the principals 
at the table any stranger who happened to 
come in dined, even if he was a travelling 
ratcatcher, tinker, or farrier. "My father," 
Mr. Crabbe goes on to say, "well describes in 
the ' Widow's Tale,' my mother's situation 
when living in her younger days at Parham : 

" But when the men beside their stations took, 
The maidens with them, and with these the cook; 
When one huge wooden bowl before them stood, 
Filled with huge balls of farinaceous food ; 
With bacon, mass saline ! where never lean 
Beneath the brown and bristly rind was seen : 
When from a single horn the party drew 
Their copious draughts of heavy ale and new; 
When the coarse cloth, she said, with many a stain, 
Soil'd by rude hands who cut and came again ; 
She could not breathe, but, with a heavy sigh, 
Reined the fair neck, and shut the offended eye ; 
She minced the sanguine flesh in pastimes fine 
And wondered much to see the creatures dine." 

Then Mr. Crabbe goes on to describe 
Mr. Tovell's cronies, who came after dinner, 
and enjoyed their punch, prosperous farmers 
or, wealthy yeomen like himself. Their talk 



LECTURE III 121 

was at times too much for Mrs. Tovell, who 
withdrew; but "the servants, being con- 
sidered much in the same point of view as 
the animals dozing on the hearth, remained." 

The life of Crabbe the poet as told by 
his son is an admirable piece of biography, 
and the Rev. George Crabbe, junr., was to 
my mind at least as good a realist in prose 
as his father in poetry. I wonder if I am 
right in conjecturing that you in New Eng- 
land had at the same time old farmers not 
very unlike Mr. Tovell who lived in pros- 
perous simplicity like the old Suffolk Yeoman, 
rough in manner, coarse in expression, and 
blunt in sensibility, yet with an honest inde- 
pendence of character which redeemed much 
which to our eyes may seem repulsive. 1 

But the object of my remarks in this lec- 
ture has been to endeavour to give you an 

1 1 have been privileged to see kitchens in old houses in New Eng- 
land, which must have been used in very much the same way as Mr. 
Tovell's. The house now preserved by the Colonial Dames at Quincy 
is a good example. 



122 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

idea of what England, or part of it, was like 
about 1800; because I have another side of 
the picture to shew in my next lecture. 
The primitive simplicity of the peasant and 
the farmer was doomed to disappear, and 
the process had already begun. Still, side by 
side with a luxurious civilisation there were 
many traces of a roughness belonging to an 
early period in human development. To 
bring these facts into light, I do not think 
that the choice of my native county of 
Suffolk is a bad one. 

When we turn from the peasant and trader, 
who in those days had little influence in 
controlling the country, to the classes which 
exercised power in the land, we come, as it 
were, to the surface of things ; but, to use an 
agricultural metaphor, we cannot explain 
the crop without some knowledge of the 
soil. The explanation of many things, strange 
now to us in the most highly polished social 
circles, can be found in the character of the 






LECTURE III 123 

middle and lower classes of the time. When 
we come in my next lecture to deal with 
academic life we shall find men of the 
highest intellect marked by much of the un- 
couthness of the people described by Crabbe 
or Cobbold, for many scholars had passed 
their early days in the same surroundings ; 
and when we go a step higher and associate 
with the wits, dandies, and politicians of 
the Regency, I think we shall acknowledge 
that only a very thin crust of superficial 
polish lay between them and the people 
whom they affected to despise. But this 
similarity does not merely extend to the 
faults of society ; it is to be found in its virtues 
also. There is no lack of virile strength in 
the characters to which I have drawn your 
attention to-day ; their good qualities are 
as marked as their defects, and we recognise 
in nearly every one of them qualities which 
brought England safe through a great crisis 
in its history. 



124 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

APPENDIX TO "MARGARET CATCHPOLE" 

The literary history of "Margaret Catchpole " is some- 
what remarkable. The book was published as a true 
romance in 1845. It immediately attained widespread 
popularity and passed through several editions. It 
was dramatised in 1846 in London; and a play bill in 
the Harvard library shews that it was acted in the 
National Theatre, Boston, Mass., April 11 and 12, 
1859. Mr. Richard Cobbold, the author, was involved 
in a dispute with Mr. Gedge, the editor of the 
Bury Post, on the historical accuracy of the story; 
both sides admitting that Margaret had married well 
in Australia, and that her son had visited Suffolk as a 
wealthy man desirous of purchasing an estate. The 
author nearly became involved in legal proceedings be- 
cause a lady in Australia had been frequently mistaken 
for his heroine, and subjected to some annoyance on this 
account. In 1910 the story was again dramatised by 
the late Laurence Irving, and it was proved that Mar- 
garet Catchpole had died a spinster : the certificate of 
burial, dated 1819, being produced. This and the docu- 
ments in the Ipswich Museum — viz. a letter written 
by her to Mrs. Cobbold when in prison, and a handbill 
offering a reward for her apprehension after her escape 
— give an unfavourable opinion of the accuracy of the 
author. The account of her arrest in the Ipswich 
Journal of April, 1800, makes no mention of the death 
of her smuggler lover. I have, however, through the 
kindness of Suffolk friends and my own relations dis- 



LECTURE III 125 

covered the documents used by Mr. Richard Cobbold, 
which had been carefully filed by his mother; and I 
have seen the sketches he made (he was no mean artist) 
to illustrate the novel, with notes made by himself in 
his 77th year. He died in 1877. Upon the whole, I 
am convinced that, though he made some serious mis- 
takes, especially about Margaret's age and marriage, 
he believed that he was writing a perfectly true account 
of her. The subject seemed to me of such interest 
to students of literary problems that I had the hardihood 
to submit it as a prelection to that respectable body the 
Council of the Senate of the University of Cambridge 
(England) under the title of "St. Luke as a Modern 
Author" (Cambridge : HefFer and Sons). If some of that 
august body considered the introduction of this romance 
in humble life as an illustration of a serious subject an 
impertinence, I can only tender my apologies. In 
America it has been suggested by many theological 
professors that "Margaret Catchpole " has a real bearing 
on the question of the composition of the Acts of the 
Apostles, and may prove a clue to that thorny problem, 
as well as to others which can be illustrated by the use 
of illiterate materials for literary purposes. Margaret's 
letters from Australia, despite the fact that she had been 
totally uneducated as a girl, are wonderfully interesting, 
and the naturalness of her style renders them far more 
readable than the polished periods which her biographer 
has put into her published letters. 



LECTURE IV 
Gunning's "Reminiscences of Cambridge " 

An English University so closely connected 
with New England must have special interest 
to you. Yet those who have been to our 
Cambridge would find it indeed hard to 
recognise it in the place I am now about to 
put before you. It changed beyond recogni- 
tion within the long lifetime of the author, 
whose reminiscences, put down during his 
long last illness, will be the text of my lec- 
ture. He had remarkable opportunities of 
observing University life, and many faculties 
of making the best of them. His hard shrewd 
face looks down upon us when we take our 
wine after dinner as guests in the combina- 
tion room of Christ's College, and is an 

indication of his character. He was no 

126 



LECTURE IV 127 

Boswell ; for he lacked appreciation of the 
men he described and though capable of de- 
voted friendship, had little affection for many 
of them. But he is an admirable raconteur 
with a shrewd eye for the absurdity of a 
situation, and will, I think, prove excellent 
company for us during the time at my dis- 
posal. 

Many of my audience have doubtless 
visited our English Cambridge before this 
war broke out, and will be able to check 
the remarks I am about to make. An easy 
run from London brings the traveller to a 
railway station so inconvenient that it could 
only have been imagined in a bad dream ; 
and he finds himself in the outskirts of a 
fair sized and rapidly increasing town. 

A dull drive through a street of shops brings 
you to the colleges ; and, if you happened to 
arrive at midday, you would find a stream of 
undergraduates in cap and gown with women 
students from Girton and Newnham issuing 



128 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

from or flowing into the lecture rooms. Sup- 
posing your host to be in his college, you 
would find the courts populous with under- 
graduates, some in cap and gown, some in 
flannel blazers, and some, proh pudor ! in 
evening pumps or even in carpet slippers. 
If you asked a question of one of them, 
you would be answered obligingly, if not 
with elaborate courtesy. Your host (a fellow 
of the college) would probably be working 
with a few pupils ; and when they with- 
drew you would either be given lunch in 
his rooms or taken to his house. A few 
friends would be asked to meet you. The 
meal would be, I hope, a good one, and 
several would not even take the wine which 
was provided. Why I say this will appear 
later. If it were summer, you would have 
been taken for a walk in the " Backs," and 
have found the narrow river crowded with 
boats full of gaily flannelled men and a 
good many ladies ; and, I think, you would 



LECTURE IV 129 

have admired the brightness of the scene. 
You might witness a cricket match, and, later 
in the evening, have watched the eights 
practising, with their coaches running, cycling, 
or riding beside them. If you dined in the 
college hall, you would find a good if not 
elaborate dinner neatly served ; and the 
company, if not brilliant, would be at least 
variegated. In the combination room, over 
a modest glass of port and perhaps a cigar, 
the conversation would turn on many topics. 
The presiding fellow, who has been every- 
where, would be laying down the law to a 
somewhat inattentive audience about hotels 
in Buda-Pesth and the old college friends 
he had met on the Yukon River. A famous 
man of letters would be giving his views on 
finance and town planning. A chemist and 
a mathematician would be absorbed in dis- 
cussing bird life. A great authority on art 
might be explaining his views on the religion 
of the future to a D.D., who ought to know, 



130 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

being by repute a heretic, but is somewhat 
inattentive as he is trying to listen, and at 
the same time endeavouring to explain to 
another man what are the prospects of the 
college boat. An anthropologist of European 
fame is being instructed by the junior fellow 
how the last fashionable dance ought to be 
performed ; and the tutor, a silent man, 
suddenly breaks in with a question as to the 
progress of one of his pupils. Naturally 
the guest is not neglected ; he would perhaps 
rather listen, especially as everyone is talk- 
ing about something he does not make his 
specialty, as all sensible people do after din- 
ner. It may be our supposed guest is taken to 
the Master's Lodge and finds several under- 
graduates on terms of easy familiarity with 
the "dons" and even with the, in old days un- 
approachable and awful, Head of the college. 
I am of course speaking of happier days be- 
fore the War had depleted our numbers and 
when we all felt friendly and sociable.' 



LECTURE IV 131 

In every scene in this imaginary sketch 
the contrast with Cambridge in the eighteenth 
century would be apparent. Except for parts 
of the buildings all is changed. In one re- 
spect the traveller who visited Cambridge 
a century ago would have had the advantage. 
Had he approached by either of the hills, 
by Madingley or the Gog Magogs, the town 
would have appeared more beautiful than 
now. Here is a description of his first view 
of the place by John Henry Newman in 1832, 
who was too great an admirer of the beauties 
of Oxford to fail to see how lovely was her 
rival : 

"Cambridge, July 16th, 1832. 

"Having come to this place with no antic- 
ipations, I am quite taken by surprise and 
overcome with delight. This, doubtless, you 
will think premature in me, inasmuch as I 
have seen yet scarcely anything, and have 
been writing letters of business to Mr. Rose 
and Rivingtons. But really, when I saw 



132 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

at the distance of four miles, on an extended 
plain, wider than Oxford, amid thicker and 
greener groves, the Alma Mater Canta- 
brigiensis lying before me, I thought I should 
not be able to contain myself, and in spite 
of my regret at her present defects and past 
history, and all that is wrong about her, 1 I 
seemed about to cry Floreat in eternum. 
Surely there is a genius loci here, as in my 
own dear home ; and the nearer I came to 
it, the more I felt its power. I do really 
think the place finer than Oxford, though 
I suppose it isn't, for everyone says so. I 
like the narrow streets ; they have a char- 
acter, and they make the University build- 
ings look larger by contrast. I cannot believe 
that King's College is not far grander than 
anything with us ; the stone, too, is richer, 
and the foliage more thick and encompass- 
ing. I found my way from the town to 

1 He means that Cambridge was, and always had been, Liberal 
and Protestant. 



LECTURE IV 133 

Trinity College like old (Edipus, without 
guide, by instinct ; how, I know not. I 
never studied the plan of Cambridge." 

Ill paved, ill drained as was the town, narrow 
as were the streets, it must have been pic- 
turesque to the eye, and the colleges, unspoiled 
by modern additions, are very attractive, to 
judge by the old prints. On the whole, how- 
ever, I think our verdict would have been that 
old Cambridge was a pleasanter place for us to 
explore than for its inhabitants to live in. 

Let us now exercise our imagination a 
little more and try to fancy what a day spent 
in Cambridge would have been like to a 
stranger towards the close of the eighteenth 
century. One thing, I think, may be as- 
sumed to be unaltered. Had he come to 
visit a friend, he would have been hos- 
pitably received. Let us suppose that he 
also arrived at midday in summer when it 
was full term and that, to quote Words- 
worth, he — 



134 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 
" At the Hoop alighted . . . famous inn." 

He certainly would not have met a troop of 
young men, let alone maidens, going in and 
out of lecture. The lectures were over : 
and the lecture rooms were never crowded. 
Perhaps some noisy fellow-commoners might 
have stared and jeered at him and quite 
possibly have insulted him. Most colleges 
were very empty of students, many rather 
dilapidated. He would have dined in the 
middle of the day, and the hall would have 
been hot, noisy, and probably ill ordered. 
Joints were passed from one diner to another 
and carved according to taste. At the high 
table, where he would dine, would be the 
resident fellows, a stray nobleman or so, and 
a few rich young men, called fellow-common- 
ers. A good deal of beer would be drunk, 
and most of the company would be rather 
cross and sleepy after the meal. The fel- 
lows, who were nearly all clergymen, would 
show themselves obsequious to the noble- 



LECTURE IV 135 

men, uneasily familiar with the fellow-com- 
moners, and completely oblivious of the schol- 
ars and pensioners, who dined at the lower 
table, and of the sizars, or poor scholars, who, 
in some cases (certainly at an earlier date), 
waited on them, and after dinner ate what 
had been left on the high table. There were 
no games to watch : and in the afternoon 
probably our guest would be mounted and 
taken for a ride. In the evening supper 
would be served and perhaps a considerable 
amount of wine drunk in the combination 
room. As political feeling ran high at the 
time, the company would probably have 
quarrelled. Very few fellows had ever left 
their native country. A few had hardly 
known any places save their homes and their 
University. 

Some must have been strangely uncouth in 
manner and appearance. Most of them were, 
as I have said, clergymen, and, of course, 
bachelors ; but their practice of celibacy 



136 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

was not always such as to fulfil the ideals of 
the advocates of that holy state in the days 
of the saints. But we have not yet finished 
our day. Supper would have been followed 
by an adjournment to a small, dirty, ill- 
lighted public house, and the walk home to 
bed might not be inaptly compared to the 
convolutions of a corkscrew. 

That such was the University in the days 
of our author I fancy some extracts from 
the book before me will convince you. He 
admits that in his youthful days Cambridge 
had sunk lower than it ever had before, and 
he trusted that such days as his might never 
recur. 

We have kept him waiting too long. Let 
me present to you Henry Gunning, Esquire 
Bedel of the University of Cambridge. He 
tells us he was a son of a clergyman in the 
neighbourhood and the descendant of "that 
admirable prelate," Dr. Peter Gunning, Bishop 
of Ely in the reign of Charles II. He entered 



LECTURE IV 137 

Christ's College in 1784, and died in 1855, 
well over eighty years of age, after a life 
spent in the University. During his long 
last illness he dictated his reminiscences. 1 
He had, at an earlier period written some 
memoirs ; but, on reflection, after a serious 
illness he had decided to burn all the papers. 
In his own words : 

"I kept an account of the decision of the 
Heads on any disputed point. . . . My notes 
became much swelled by rumours of jobbing 
among the higher powers, which, though 
sometimes defeated, were generally so skil- 
fully conducted that they more frequently 
succeeded. I had collected sufficient mate- 
rials for publishing a pretty large volume, 
but was about that time attacked by a sudden 
and dangerous illness, which afforded more 

1 A series of letters by Gunning's devoted nurse, Miss Mary Beart, 
was published in the Cambridge Review by Mr. A. T. Bartholomew, 
of the University Library, and has been reprinted. His " Reminis- 
cences " were not received with favor by the authorities : only one Head 
of a house, Dr. Benedict Chapman, Master of Caius, appears among 
the subscribers. 



138 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

opportunity for serious reflection than I 
had before accustomed myself to. . . . I 
was apprehensive that I might have inserted 
some things (which I believed to be facts) 
upon questionable authority. ... I feared 
that the papers might fall into the hands of 
some bookseller whose only object would 
be gain, to obtain which he would not scruple 
to whitewash men whose characters ought 
to have been drawn in the darkest colours, 
or to speak in extremely harsh terms of others 
on whose eccentricities I only wished to pass 
a slight censure. Too ill to admit of delay, 
I decided on committing all my papers to 
the flames, nor did I for fifty years regret 
the step." Gunning died before his task 
was completed : his memoirs terminated 
abruptly ; but the most interesting part of 
his work has happily survived, and the ear- 
lier reminiscences, as is customary with the 
aged, are more full and vivid than the 
later. 



LECTURE IV 139 

I shall not attempt to moralise or discant 
much upon his story ; but I intend to give 
it in his own words with a few remarks in 
passing. 

Henry Gunning entered Christ's College 
as a sizar, a poor scholar who was at one 
time supposed to be fed by what was left of 
the meals provided for the fellows (a Christ's 
College sizar being the equivalent of a " servi- 
tor" at Oxford), though Gunning says noth- 
ing of this. 1 As we shall see, he led anything 
but the life of a humble dependant whilst 
at the University. His college had been and 
now is among the most distinguished at 
Cambridge. It had produced John Milton 
and Ralph Cudworth, and had been a fa- 
mous centre of the intellectual life of the 

1 The practice of sizars waiting in Hall on the fellows seems to have 
been discontinued at an early date. Dr. Bass Mullinger alludes to 
complaints made in the seventeenth century that servants were tak- 
ing the place of poor scholars. To Dr. T. G. Bonney of St. John's 
I owe many valuable hints on this and other subjects of a kindred 
nature. His "A Septuagenarian's Recollections of St. John's," 
printed in the Eagle, the College Magazine, June, 1909, was most 
useful to me. 



140 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

seventeenth century. It was the college of 
William Paley, who was Senior Wrangler 
in 1763, and it was destined to be the school 
of many a famous man, among them Charles 
Darwin. But only three men entered with 
our hero in 1785. 

The two tutors, Mr. Parkinson and Mr. Seale, 
were in a sense men of mark. The former 
had been disappointed in failing to be elected 
Master ; and was engaged to a very beautiful 
young lady, whose numerous admirers made 
him at times uncomfortable. As Mr. Park- 
inson had an eighteen-mile ride to get to 
his lady-love, he lectured in cap and gown, 
but also booted and spurred, and snubbed 
young Gunning when he asked for explana- 
tions of difficult points in the lecture. 

Accordingly his pupil gave up lectures 
and decided not to read at all ; but at the 
end of the term the tutor spoke most kindly 
and encouragingly, as an old friend of his 
pupil's father. The result was that Gunning 



LECTURE IV 141 

became, for a time at least, a reading man, 
and was much encouraged by his friend 
Hartley, a Yorkshireman who shewed him 
the solution of the difficulties which Parkin- 
son was too impatient to explain. When 
Parkinson examined Gunning he found that 
his progress was most satisfactory, encour- 
aged him most kindly to persist ; and when 
Gunning told him of a man who was reputed 
to read twelve hours a day in hopes of sur- 
passing the expected Senior Wrangler, he 
remarked, "If he mean to beat him he had 
better devote six hours to reading and six 
hours to reflecting on what he has read." 
Seale, the other tutor, was a good teacher 
and a really humorous lecturer. "Nothing 
could be pleasanter than the hour passed 
at his lecture, such was his kindness to all. 
. . . When any ludicrous blunder occurred 
... he joined in the laugh as heartily as 
any of us." Seale seems to have been a 
very able scholar, but somewhat quarrelsome : 



142 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

he became chaplain to the Archbishop of 
Canterbury ; but had to resign because he 
quarrelled with the butler about the wine 
supplied at the chaplains' table. However, 
Gunning had nothing to complain of in regard 
to the education he got from his college. 

He was not always a close student ; and 
both his diversions and his friends are more 
interesting in illustrating his times, than are 
his tutors or his reading. May I for a 
moment digress and explain the constitution 
of the University ? Except for a very few 
professors and the officials — Vice-Chancel- 
lor, Proctors, Taxors, and Moderators, etc. — 
the University was practically non-existent. 
The colleges did virtually all the teaching 
and were self-contained bodies. 1 

A man got little or no instruction outside 
his own college ; the University examined him 
and gave him his degree — that was all. 

1 The colleges were everything, the University a mere degree-giving 
Corporation, says the late Mr. J. W. Clark in his "Memories and 
Customs" (1820-1860), reprinted from the Cambridge Review, 1909. 



LECTURE IV 143 

The real rulers of the University were the 
Masters of the colleges. Most of them were 
highly placed ecclesiastics, and, consequently, 
had frequently to be absent from Cambridge ; 
but as the "Heads" might marry, and fellows 
had to resign their position on taking a wife, 
they constituted a permanent element, and 
became all-powerful. I myself have often 
heard stories of the time when the Master 
of a college, and his family, belonged to an 
aristocracy to which no ordinary Master of 
Arts could hope to be admitted ; and, you 
may be sure, the ladies who reigned in the 
lodges were very careful to keep the wives 
and daughters of such married graduates as 
happened to live in the town at their proper 
distance. Gunning will have plenty to say 
about them. The fellows of the colleges 
were for the most part non-resident ; only 
the tutors and a few old men resided with 
any permanence in the colleges. With a 
few exceptions the fellows who stayed in 



144 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

Cambridge were either very young men or 
very strange old bachelors who seldom left 
the town. What instruction was given was 
given by the college tutors, and most of the 
fellows who lived in Cambridge served as 
curates to the different village churches. 
Some were almost entirely idle men, and 
one, who shall be nameless, found them no 
little mischief to do. 

The fellows dined at the high table, to 
which the nobility were also admitted. 
Noblemen, i.e. peers, the eldest sons of peers, 
and men who could prove royal descent, 
had till comparatively recently had the right 
of proceeding to the degree of M.A. after 
two years of residence without taking any 
examination or the degree of B.A. In Gun- 
ning's early days peers wore on state occasions 
a magnificent academical dress varying in 
colour according to taste. Then came the 
fellow-commoners, men of wealth, who paid 
far higher fees than the ordinary students 



LECTURE IV 145 

and dined with the fellows. These were also 
distinguished by the magnificence of their 
academic attire. It is difficult to imagine 
a much worse system of education. The 
nobility and fellow-commoners were kept 
apart from the ordinary men, often grossly 
flattered by the fellows and even by the 
Masters of the colleges. Work was not 
expected of them, and their example was 
often pernicious alike to the students and 
to the younger fellows. The majority of the 
young men were classed as scholars, who 
with the fellows formed what is called the 
"society" of the colleges, pensioners, and 
sizars or servitors. Almost all were intend- 
ing to take Holy Orders : a few, however, 
became barristers or medical practitioners. 
The University was very small. In 1748 
there were only 1500 on the books of the 
colleges ; this includes non-residents, who were 
almost certainly in the majority. In 1801 
the total of residents in the University, in- 



146 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

eluding, I suppose, the servants who slept in 
college, was 803. 

Gunning certainly kept good company, 
and this is how he enjoyed himself. He was 
a keen sportsman, and Cambridge afforded 
excellent opportunity for him to indulge his 
taste. The fenlands were not preserved and 
abounded with waterfowl. Young lads and 
boys were always ready to carry the game 
and to provide poles to leap the fen ditches. 
The fishing was excellent, and so both sum- 
mer and winter could be fully occupied by 
the sportsman. We hear nothing of any 
games or athletics from Gunning. Every- 
body rode, but there was apparently no 
hunting. Here is a riding story told by Mr. 
Gunning. Dr. Watson, Bishop of Llandaff, 
was remarkable for holding many posts simul- 
taneously and of impartially neglecting the 
duties of all. Yet he possessed undoubted 
gifts, and his was the only criticism of Gib- 
bon's famous chapters about the rise of 



LECTURE IV 147 

Christianity which the historian deemed 
worthy of his attention. He took a high 
degree in 1759 and five years later became 
Professor of Chemistry. For two years he 
held the chairs of Chemistry and Divinity 
together; and for thirty-two years he was 
Bishop of Llandaff, and Regius Professor of 
Divinity in Cambridge, discharging the duties 
of both offices from his house in the Lake 
district in the North of England. Apropos 
of this house in Westmorland, Gunning tells 
a good story. The proprietor of the Cock 
Inn out of compliment to Dr. Watson changed 
the name of his hostelry to the "Bishop's 
Head" and painted his Lordship on the sign- 
board. The ostler, who had saved money, 
built a rival hotel which he called "The 
Cock. " Thereupon the landlord of the " Bish- 
op's Head," finding custom leaving him, put 
an inscription under the portrait, "This is 
the Old Cock." 

Dr. Watson's deputy professor was Dr. 



148 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

Kipling, who was very unpopular from the 
way in which he held aloof from the under- 
graduates, so the young men resolved to 
have their revenge. Dr. Kipling's principal 
recreation, to quote our author, "was a daily 
ride to the hills, which at that time was the 
most frequented road among members of 
the University. Returning one day, he 
picked up an ostrich feather which he saw 
drop from the hat of a lady, who was 
proceeding very slowly about fifty yards in 
advance. 

"On overtaking her he presented the 
feather, accompanied by an expression rela- 
tive to the good fortune in being able to restore 
it. The lady thanked him for his kindness, 
and, expressing her annoyance that her ser- 
vant was not in attendance, said she had 
just left General Adeane's. . . . The Doctor 
begged her not to be uneasy, as he should 
have much pleasure in attending her until 
her servant appeared. They had not pro- 



LECTURE IV 149 

ceeded far before they began to meet parties 
of young men who were going out for their 
morning's ride. From the significant glances 
that were exchanged between the parties 
Dr. Kipling could not fail to discover he had 
got into bad company. That he might rid 
himself of his new acquaintance, ... he 
clapped spurs to his horse, which had been 
selected with his well-known Yorkshire dis- 
cernment. The lady was well mounted, and 
applying her whip briskly kept up with the 
Doctor." Thus they rode together through 
the town, and the story was long related 
in the University. The lady's name was 
Jemima Watson. No relation to the Bishop 
and Professor of that name ! You will, I 
think, see that Mr. Gunning had a keen eye 
for character and no little malice ; and I 
propose to deal with some of the strange 
personalities of the time depicted by him. 
On taking a very good degree, our author 
might reasonably have looked for a fellow- 



150 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

ship, but this was not possible because "his 
county'' was already in possession of one. I 
may explain that it was the law that at a 
small college like Christ's the fellows should 
be so selected that no two persons born in 
the same county should be on the list together. 
This was intended to protect a college from 
being monopolised by a single county, by 
the fellows choosing their friends. But at 
this time the office of Esquire Bedel was 
vacant, and Gunning was elected to it. The 
Vice-Chancellor at this time was attended 
on all ceremonial occasions by three Esquire 
Bedels and also by Yeoman Bedels. The 
former officers still exist, but their number 
has been reduced to two. Gunning's col- 
leagues were Mr. William Mathew, Senior 
Fellow and Bursar of Jesus College, and the 
famous Mr. Beverley, of Gunning's own col- 
lege. Mathew, an excellent man, gave his 
friend the following description of the duties 
of his office. They were first carving at the 



LECTURE IV 151 

Vice-Chancellor's table, and in this Beverley 
was unrivalled and always kept the best 
slices for himself. 

Second only to the art of carving was 
the practice of punctuality, which was thus 
defined: "The statutes of the University 
enjoin the Respondent to dispute from the 
first to the third hour. The authorities con- 
sider the statutes to be complied with pro- 
vided the Disputant is in the box before the 
clock strikes two and does not leave it until 
after it has struck three. . . . There are 
other points of practice which are soon 
learned." As says Gunning, "most of them 
were founded on a violation of the statutes. 
I inserted them in a memorandum book." 

The senior Esquire Bedel was Mr. Beverley, 
a most remarkable man. Gunning hated 
him with all his heart and introduces him 
in these words : 

"If his own account of himself is to be 
believed (and perhaps in this instance his 



152 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

word maybe taken), he was the most profligate 
man in the University. He obtained his 
office by the influence of the famous Lord 
Sandwich, the friend and betrayer of Wilkes, 
immortalised as Jenny Twitcher. Beverley 
had a large family, borrowed from every- 
body, and cheated all he could. Lord Sand- 
wich entertained magnificently at Hinch- 
inbrooke Castle, about fourteen miles from 
Cambridge, and Beverley was not above 
procuring invitations for members of the 
University who paid him." 

He must have had many attractive quali- 
ties and was a good musician. People were 
always trying to get him out of debt, espe- 
cially Mr. Basil Montagu, a son of Lord 
Sandwich. 

Montagu collected money to free him 
from his pressing liabilities and then invited 
Beverley to tea and read him a long lecture 
on his extravagance. Poor Beverley departed 
in tears, not having been told what his 



LECTURE IV 153 

benefactor intended to do. Montagu felt 
he had been too severe and feared that 
Beverley might give way to despair and even 
kill himself. But, instead of finding the 
prodigal a corpse, he heard sounds of music 
if not of dancing, and found his volatile friend 
seated at his table with a bowl of punch 
and several boon companions. "After this 
exhibition Montagu troubled himself no 
further about Beverley's debts." 

A notable character of the time was a 
certain Jimmy Gordon, who had fallen from 
a position of affluence to one of extreme 
degradation. 1 Seeing the Master of Trinity, 
who was also Bishop of Bristol, Gordon 
begged of him. His Lordship replied, "If 
you can find a greater scoundrel than your- 
self, I will give you a half a crown." Off went 
Gordon and told Beverley that the Master 
wished to speak to him. The Master, when 



1 Gordon is introduced by Lord Lytton in one of his novels — I 
think " Pelham." 



154 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

Beverley came, remarked, "You have been 
misinformed, Mr. Beverley." Up came 
Jimmy at this moment and said, "I think, 
my lord, I am entitled to my half crown." 

I feel I must relate one more example of 
Beverley's behaviour. On Midlent Sunday 
it was customary for the Vice-Chancellor 
to drive in state and preach in the church 
at Burwell and be accompanied by one or 
more of the Esquire Bedels. After the ser- 
mon they all dined at a farmer's house and 
so enjoyed the ale and port wine that they 
did not go and hear the vicar at afternoon 
service. "What sort of preacher is Mr. 
Turner ? " asked the Vice-Chancellor. " For 
my own part," replied the tenant, " I would 
not go over the threshold to hear him preach." 
" If that be your opinion, who have had fre- 
quent opportunities of hearing him, I am of 
that opinion too ; and we will remain and 
have a few more glasses of your fine old 
port." Needless to remark, the clergyman 



LECTURE IV 155 

was furious at the having been thus neglected. 
On the way back to Cambridge a Mr. Hole, 
who was acting as a deputy Bedel, attacked 
Mr. Beverley, who had a good deal of wit, 
and gave him more than he got. Then the 
Vice-Chancellor tried to defend Mr. Hole, 
and he too got more than he bargained for. 
So he stopped the carriage and told Beverley 
to go and sit on the box. The Bedel refused, 
and told the other two that they had better 
get out and walk home. "They declined 
to follow this advice," and "it was not long 
before perfect quiet reigned among them, 
and the university Marshal who acted as 
Vice-Chancellor's servant imagined (and it 
was not a very improbable conclusion) that 
they had been overtaken by the drowsy god." 
A more reputable but still very striking 
character was Dr. Milner, the President of 
Queen's College. His portrait is one I often 
study when I dine there. A portly man 
in his red gown and doctor's wig, he sits 



156 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

grasping the arms of his chair, looking very 
strong and masterful. In politics a strong 
Tory, attached by religious sympathy to the 
evangelical party, editor of the " Church His- 
tory " of his brother, from his force of charac- 
ter and his mathematical ability Milner was 
long the ruler of the University. Caring 
nothing for public opinion, he would have 
his own way ; and he is reported to have once 
exclaimed, when settling a man's place in an 
examination and the man's tutor exclaimed, 
" Surely you do not say that A is better than 
B ?" "I never said he was the better man; 
I said he should stand above him." It was 
the custom for the moderators who conducted 
the Tripos and made out the lists to submit 
any doubtful cases to some great mathe- 
matician, who held a viva voce examination ; 
and, as Milner's undoubted ability made 
his judgment of great value, he was often 
called to do this. Except where men of 
his own college or Magdalene, a great centre 



LECTURE IV 157 

of evangelicalism, were concerned, his judg- 
ment was excellent ; but Gunning considers 
that he was quite unscrupulous when his 
partiality or interest led him to decide a 
point. Milner, though an ardent pietist and 
a valetudinarian, was somewhat notorious 
for the joviality of his supper parties, at which 
the bowl circulated freely and the fun was 
fast and furious. His powerful personality 
dominated the University, as may be seen 
from the fact that he did his best to stop the 
reform of Trinity College. In his account 
of this Mr. Gunning draws a striking picture 
of the Seniority of the college in the closing 
years of the eighteenth century. By its stat- 
utes Trinity was practically governed by 
the Master and the ten Senior Fellows, the 
latter men who had lived for years in the 
college without generally doing any work, 
being content with holding their fellowship 
and living in celibate idleness. Their power 
was great ; and, as it may well be supposed, 



158 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

they were not as a rule qualified to exercise it, 
especially when they claimed a right to select 
the fellows themselves without regard to the 
reports of the examiners. The tutors fought 
a hard battle to remove this abuse and were 
taunted by Milner and the Tory party with 
being Jacobites and supporters of the French 
Revolution. The matter was decided in the 
courts, and the tutors won, with the result that 
a fellowship at Trinity became, in Macaulay's 
words, a veritable "patent of nobility." 

I abbreviate Gunning's description of the 
Seniority partly from a sense of propriety. 

The Rev. Stephen Whiston, B.D., was, says 
our author, " I believe a very respectable 
man." 

The Rev. Samuel Backhouse, B.D., kept 
a girls' school at a village called Balsham. 

"Was it profit that he sought ? 
No ; he paid them to be taught. 
Had he honour for his aim ? 
No ; he blushed to find it fame." 



LECTURE IV 159 

The Rev. Samuel Peck, B.D., must have 
been rather a nice old man. He was a great 
authority on village law and helped the coun- 
try people gratis, saying, " Sam Peck never 
takes a fee, but he loves gratitude," and the 
farmers paid him in presents of the produce 
of their land. He played a very clever 
trick upon Gunning's old tutor Seale by per- 
suading him to share the expenses of treating 
two ladies on a journey from London to 
Cambridge, who turned out to be his own 
cook and waitress ! * 

The Rev. Thomas Wilson, B.D., had to 
have his garden key taken away because he 
was rude to the Master's wife one dark even- 
ing when she was returning from a party. 

The Rev. John Higgs, B.D., and the Rev. 
Thomas Spencer, B.D., were unknown to 
Gunning. Mr. Spencer was mad, and only 
came to Cambridge when his vote was 

1 A caricature of Mr. Peck is preserved in the combination room, 
Trinity College. He is riding a pony laden with farm produce. 



160 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

wanted. The Rev. William Collier, B.D., 
was a well-known gourmand. He is recorded 
to have eaten three-quarters of a sucking 
pig and to have left the rest because he was 
engaged to dine immediately after. He was a 
Hebrew scholar, a good classic, and a modern 
linguist. The Rev. James Lambert was an 
excellent sportsman and was supposed to be 
unorthodox. "Lambert was never addicted 
to those vices for which at that time the 
Seniors of Trinity were so notorious, but 
when in college attended closely to literary 
pursuits." He was Professor of Greek. 

Observe, except Lambert all were B.D.'s. 
Here is an epitaph : 

" Here lies a Fellow of Trinity. 
He was a Doctor of Divinity. 
He knew as much about Divinity 
As other Fellows do of Trinity." 

My last character shall be Dr. Farmer, 
Master of Emmanuel, a most amiable and 
delightful man. We make his acquaintance 



LECTURE IV 161 

as curate of the parish of Swavesey, a village 
with a most beautiful church, then a place 
much larger and more prosperous than it 
is at present. Almost all the parishes around 
Cambridge were served by fellows of the 
colleges, who went over on Sunday to take 
the prayers, and they were rarely visited on 
any other day by a clergyman. Sunday was 
a great day in the colleges, as these clergy- 
men met after its labours, and ate most jovial 
suppers. Farmer was regarded as a model 
of punctiliousness in the performance of his 
duties, as he made a point of never missing 
a Sunday at Swavesey and of dining after 
service at the inn, to which meal he usually 
invited one or more of the farmers. He then 
rode back to Cambridge, slept an hour or so, 
and appeared in the Emmanuel "parlour," 
where he was the delight of the whole party. 
People used to come for the week end from 
London for the pleasure of hearing Farmers 
conversation ; and Mr. Pitt was much at- 



162 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

tached to him. He was fond of rushing up 
to London to dine ; and one Ash Wednesday 
morning he announced to his Vice-Chan- 
cellor that he had to make haste to get to 
the University church in time, for at "three 
o'clock this morning I was blowing my pipe 
with the worshipful company of pewterers." 
Dr. Farmer became Master of Emmanuel ; 
and Gunning suggests that he might have 
become Head of Trinity for the asking ; but 
when Mr. Pitt sought his advice as to whom 
he should choose, he simply replied, "If you 
want to oblige the society, appoint Postel- 
thwaite." He was a great admirer of Shake- 
speare, and never missed a performance when 
a play of his was acted. 

But we must leave these quaint person- 
ages for a more general view of the life of the 
University. It had its splendid as well as 
its sordid side. Dress, as I have already 
hinted, played a great part in the pageant 
of the old place. Here is Gunning's descrip- 



LECTURE IV 163 

tion of the fetes at Commencement at the 
end of the summer term : 

"On Commencement Sunday, the college 
walks were crowded. Every doctor of the 
University wore his scarlet robes during the 
whole day. Every nobleman wore his splen- 
did robes, not only in St. Mary's and in the 
college halls, but also in the public walks. 
Their robes (which are now uniformly pur- 
ple) were at that time of various colours 
according to the taste of the wearers ; purple, 
white, green, and rose colour were to be seen 
at the same time." 

There was also a good deal of ceremonial at 
other times ; and the barbaric was occasion- 
ally mingled with the magnificent, as, for ex- 
ample, at the opening of Stourbridge Fair. 
This Fair, now a poor and insignificant gather- 
ing, was once the most famous in England 
and had ranked among the great fairs of 
Europe. In Gunning's early days much of its 
splendour remained. At its opening the Vice- 



164 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

Chancellor with his Bedels and Commissary, 
the Registrary, the Proctors, and the Taxors, 
met in the Senate House at eleven, where 
everybody drank sherry and ate cakes. After 
this all drove to the Common, and the Vice- 
Chancellor proclaimed the Fair to be open, 
the Yeomen Bedels on horseback repeating 
his words at different parts of the assembly. 
Then followed a devouring of oysters in what 
was known as the Tiled Booth, after which 
the University magnates strolled about the 
Fair till dinner was ready. It was no easy 
task to get into the dining-room, because the 
people outside would not budge to allow the 
procession to pass, the University being very 
unpopular because they supplied the mugs 
in which the beer was sold and these held 
notoriously short measure. This was the 
only effort in the direction of temperance 
we meet with at this period, and that was 
dishonest. The dinner consisted of boiled 
pork, herrings, goose, apple-pie, and beef. 



LECTURE IV 165 

The wine was bad, but everyone enjoyed him- 
self, despite the heat and discomfort of the 
Tiled Booth. At half-past six they all went 
to the theatre. How they got home is not 
recorded ! 

Of intellectual pursuits Gunning has little 
to record. The disputations for degrees con- 
tinued from the Middle Ages, in which he 
took part frequently as disputant and, know- 
ing the rules of logic, he was often able to 
overthrow men of admittedly more learning 
than himself. There were good scholars and 
learned men at Cambridge ; but we hear more 
of their schemes, their quarrels, and their 
amours than of their achievements in the 
schools. 

Porson, the most famous Grecian since 
Bentley, is hardly if ever mentioned ! 

It is a strange record of the days of old, 
and the Cambridge therein described seems 
to have been in another world than this. 
Yet some of us were alive when Henry Gun- 



1 66 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

ning died, and I can myself remember char- 
acters almost as strange as he depicts. But 
in all the book there is no one so strange 
as the writer himself. In it we have the 
record, not of a diarist, but of an old, old 
man in his last illness, a man by his own 
account not devoid of piety or good feeling, 
yet recollecting every slight, every injury, 
he had sustained nearly sixty years before, 
the dislikes of his youth for men long gone 
to their account being as green and vigorous 
as they were when he first formed them. 
One cannot even like him, but nevertheless 
it is impossible to deny that he can not only 
amuse but instruct, and that much would 
have been forgotten but for his dictated 
notes about the Cambridge of his youth. 

It was a nobler University before that 
age, and it has risen perhaps even to greater 
heights since. Gunning saw the University 
of Beverley and the Seniors of Trinity shine 
once more as the University of Whewell 



LECTURE IV 167 

and Macaulay, of Darwin, Tennyson, and 
scores of great and good men. 1 

That the improvement in days to come 
may equal if not surpass that which Gun- 
ning witnessed is the prayer of him who has 
made the " Reminiscences " the subject of 
this lecture. 

1 In justice to Gunning it ought to be said that men like Adam 
Sedgewick, the great geologist, regarded him with affection, and 
during his long illness the lady who attended him as nurse was devoted 
to him; and her record of the patience with which the old man bore 
his sufferings referred to above, deserves to be read by those who 
would form a fair estimate of his character. But whilst not denying 
my author all good qualities, I maintain that he not only depicts 
but represents an age singular for its coarseness of feeling and absence 
of ideals; though, to do him justice, he shewed himself a consistent 
opponent of the evils of his time in Cambridge. 



LECTURE V 

Creevey Papers — The Regency 

It is time we entered better society than 
we have been in for the last few lectures. Of 
course much depends on the meaning of 
the word " better." I do not think we need 
attach any moral significance to it. Let me 
at once admit that by better, I mean more 
select, or, perhaps, " exclusive " is the right 
term. For most people in the time of which 
I am about to treat it was necessary to 
be born to good society in order to obtain 
an entrance to it. Yet there were exceptions. 
Whilst there were men like Brougham whose 
genius compelled recognition, though they 
were made to feel that they neither were 
nor could be members of the inner circle ; 
there were others, without even his social 

168 



LECTURE V 169 

qualifications, who took their place therein 
and made themselves felt and even feared 
by the highest in the land. Such a man was 
the author of the papers from which I shall 
borrow so much to-day ; nor can we forget 
that the rival in ton to the Prince Regent 
himself, the first gentleman in Europe, was 
Brummell, the tradesman's son. 

The subject of my remarks to-day will be 
at first mainly political, not that I have any 
desire to raise controversial questions ; but 
one is bound to do so, when speaking of 
English life during the great war with Napo- 
leon, which bears so striking an analogy to the 
present. There is a marked tendency to-day 
to say that the conduct of our statesmen and 
of society in general contrasts unfavourably 
with that of men of a century ago ; and I 
think I shall be able to prove conclusively 
that, under very different conditions the pas- 
sions of men are much the same as formerly, 
and that, if the advantage is on either side, 



170 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

it is with the present rather than with the 
past. 

I feel I have set myself a very difficult 
task in attempting to define a Whig in the 
later years of George III. 

The strength of the party was the new 
aristocracy created by Henry VIII with the 
spoils of the monasteries, of which the Caven- 
dishs, Russells, and other houses were the 
leaders. 1 They were naturally strongly Prot- 
estant : and their immense power dates 
from the Revolution in 1688. Their rivals, 
the Tories, were in opposition till the acces- 
sion of George III ; and, as their sympathies 
were all on the side of the exiled Roman 
Catholic Stuarts, they had little or no influ- 
ence. When, however, George III, a prince 
born in England, ascended the throne, the 
Tories, who bore him no grudge for his 
treatment of the exiled royal family, rallied 



1 Disraeli's "Sybil " gives a scathing portraiture of the great Whig 
families in his sketch of the career of the Earls of Marney. 



LECTURE V 171 

to the young monarch, who was resolved 
not to submit, as his grandfather had done, 
to the tyranny of the Whig oligarchy. 
Henceforward the Tories were on the side 
of the Crown, whilst their opponents resisted 
its encroachments. The revolt of the Ameri- 
can colonies, provoked by Mr. Grenville's 
Stamp Act, made the Whigs oppose the King, 
who was determined to coerce his disaffected 
subjects. When the French Revolution broke 
out, this party sympathised with the repub- 
licans ; and were opposed to the war which 
began in 1792. Their following consisted of 
the dissenters and intellectuals : the former 
drawing their strength from the commercial 
classes, and the latter consisting of young 
men, enamoured with the cult of reason 
and extremely susceptible to new ideas. The 
bulk of the nation, however, the Church, the 
country gentry, the farmers, profiting by war 
prices, and even the lower orders, was Tory. 
The non-aristocratic members of the Whig 



172 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

party were often great sufferers. They were 
exposed to mob violence, as in the case of 
Dr. Priestley, to social ostracism, and to vin- 
dictive prosecutions by the government. But 
the great houses maintained their position 
and were too strongly entrenched in it to be 
seriously disturbed. 

Thus we have the spectacle of liberal 
ideas being championed by a coterie of great 
families, haughty, withdrawn from common 
folk, and so exclusive that it was almost 
impossible to gain admission to their circle. 
Hereditary exercise of power extending over 
fully a century made them skilled politi- 
cians ; and when they recruited talent from 
the middle classes, the Whigs made their 
allies feel their dependence upon the ruling 
caste. Neither the philosophy of Edmund 
Burke in one generation, nor the versatility 
of Henry Brougham in another, prevented 
either from the sense of being in a state of 
dependence on their patrons. 



LECTURE V 173 

One man, however, without the advantages 
of birth or wealth, enjoyed the privilege of 
moving freely in this charmed circle, in the 
person of Mr. Creevey, whose memoirs only 
appeared in 1903. His editor, Sir Herbert 
Maxwell, describes his abilities as hardly 
of the second order, but I must confess that, 
considering the position he occupied in the 
party, I cannot share his opinion. Married 
to a Mrs. Orde and apparently living on his 
wife's moderate fortune, sitting for Thetford, 
a close borough of the Duke of Norfolk's, 
and after his wife's death subsisting on an 
income of £200 (#1000) a year, he never 
stooped to flatter, gave his advice without 
fear or favour, and, when the Duke put him 
out of his seat in the House of Commons, 
wrote the head of the English peerage a 
letter which shewed that he looked on his 
patron as an equal who had treated him 
very shabbily. From the Duke's reply to 
"My dear Creevey" it is easy to see that his 



174 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

Grace recognised that he had offended, not a 
humble dependant, but a man of great polit- 
ical and social influence. 

I am now going to select a few passages 
dating from the rupture of the Peace of 
Amiens in 1803 and onwards, shewing how 
England was rent by faction, even in the 
most perilous days of the war with Napoleon. 
Remember that often the country was fight- 
ing alone against perhaps the greatest genius 
the world has ever seen, and that her position 
at times appeared to be almost hopeless. 

In 1804, when Buonaparte's camp was 
established at Boulogne ready for the inva- 
sion of England, party feeling ran extraor- 
dinarily high. Pitt was becoming impatient 
of the incompetence of his friend Adding- 
ton ; and, as a party manoeuvre, he moved 
for an inquiry into the conduct of Admiral 
Lord St. Vincent and was supported by Fox. 
Creevey writes that he is convinced that the 
accused is innocent ; but still he felt bound 



LECTURE V 175 

to vote with Fox. "I am," he says, "more 
passionately attached every day to party. 
I am certain that without it nothing can be 
done. ,, A month later the King's madness 
was coming on, and Creevey hopes that this 
attack will make an end of him as a ruler. 
"I hope that the Monarch is done and can 
no longer make ministers." Later on, the 
prospect of disaffection in Ireland fills Creevey 
with hopes that Pitt's position may become 
impossible ; he says, " The country engaged 
in a new war unnecessarily undertaken and 
ungraciously entered upon, the Catholics dis- 
contented, and the Opposition unbroken. If 
such a combination of circumstances does 
not shake the Treasury bench, what can?" 
The next year, 1805 (Trafalgar), brings to 
Mr. Creevey and his friends the hope that 
Mr. Pitt may be exposed for lending Govern- 
ment money to a firm which had recently 
gone bankrupt. In 1808, when Sir Arthur 
Wellesley began his work in the Peninsula, 



176 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

the convention of Cintra made him most 
unpopular ; and the nation was, says Sir 
Herbert Maxwell, "almost unanimous in de- 
manding his degradation if not his death." 
Mr. Whitbred writes to Mr. Creevey, "I 
grieve for the opportunity which has been 
lost of acquiring national glory, but I am not 
sorry to see the Wellesley pride a little low- 
ered." The next year witnessed the lamen- 
table failure of the Walcheren Expedition, 
and Wellesley's victory of Talavera. Captain 
Graham Moore, brother to Sir John Moore, 
writes to Creevey : "The Cannings are in a 
damned dilemma with this expedition and 
the victory of Talavera. They mean, I 
understand, to saddle poor Lord Chatham 
with the first, but who can they saddle the 
victory with ? They cannot attack the 
Wellesleys as they did my poor brother. 
What a cursed set you (politicians) are." The 
passage of the Douro by Wellesley led to 
Mr. Whitbred addressing the General in most 



LECTURE V 177 

complimentary terms ; but the war occupied 
people's thoughts but little, the main interest 
being centred in the exposure of the scan- 
dalous sale of commissions in the army by 
Mrs. Clarke, a friend of the Duke of York's. 
Two years later, in 181 1, Creevey takes 
encouragement from the number of sick in 
the army of Portugal and hopes it may bring 
about peace, and when the war in Spain 
was nearing its victorious conclusion a friend 
writes to him, abusing Wellington. 

These remarks are indeed the mild utter- 
ances of leaders of a party more interested 
in disparaging their political opponents than 
in the progress of the war. When we turn 
to the extreme wing of the party we find 
Napoleon a hero and his defeat a calamity : 

"But even with such mighty odds against 
him the towering and gigantic genius of 
Napoleon would have defied them all, if 
English money had not bribed some of his 
generals. It was this, and this only, that 



178 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

completed his downfall. To talk of the 
Duke of Wellington as the conqueror of 
Napoleon is an insult to the understanding 
of any intelligent man ; and for Lord Castle- 
reagh to have boasted of having subdued 
him as his lordship was wont to do, was piti- 
ful, was wondrous pitiful. " So wrote Lady 
Ann Hamilton ; in the same strain also at 
an earlier period spoke Mr. Fox of the vir- 
tues of his country's greatest and most deter- 
mined enemy. It is thus that history repeats 
itself in the wars my country has waged in 
her long history. 

I now pass to a character very different 
from Creevey's, to the man who ruled the 
fashionable world with an authority even 
more undisputed than that of the Prince of 
Wales, Beau Brummell, the prince of the 
dandies. The Beau had no advantages of 
birth and only a moderate fortune. It is 
often the custom to regard him as a mere 
coxcomb, the outcome of a frivolous society 



LECTURE V 179 

fitted only to point a moral and adorn a 
tale. I venture to take a more charitable 
view of him and to give my opinion that he 
owed his ascendancy to something more 
than extravagance of dress and unbounded 
impudence. 

To take but a single example : Everybody 
knows the story of Brummell walking with 
Lord Alvanley in the Park being cut by the 
Prince Regent and enquiring in an audible 
voice, "Who is your fat friend ?" There is 
very little point in the remark except its 
offensiveness. But the biographer of Brum- 
mell, Captain Jesse, got the true version from 
a friend who witnessed the incident. It 
was not in the Park, but at a ball given by 
Brummell, Lord Alvanley, and two others. 
The Prince was not invited, because of his 
quarrel with Brummell ; but, as everybody 
was going, he signified his pleasure to be 
present. When he arrived he greeted Lord 
Alvanley and his other two hosts, cutting 



180 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

Brummell pointedly, thereby insulting one 
of his entertainers. The Prince had by a 
gross breach of good taste placed himself in 
an impossible position. If he did not know 
his host, his host had a right to regard him as 
an uninvited intruder ; therefore the question 
was a snub, unanswerable even by the Regent. 
The life of Brummell is the record of much 
folly and frivolity, ending with a long exile 
in Calais, which terminated in imbecility 
and death in an almshouse. Nevertheless 
this famous dandy, fop though he was, is 
one of those butterflies whose useless lives 
at least add to the beauty of the scene. Nor 
is it for the recorder of his time to point the 
finger of scorn at him. Absurd as his ideal 
was, it was not wholly contemptible. His 
vanity was not malicious, he was at least 
no sycophant, he held his own among aristo- 
crats, who were as vulgar as they were arro- 
gant. He shamed his associates into decent 
manners, at a period when social polish was 



LECTURE V 181 

hardly skin deep. He insisted on personal 
cleanliness in days when it was disregarded 
by the highest in the land. He had the art 
of making friends who stood by him in his 
hours of poverty and distress. The Duke of 
York, with all his faults the best liked son of 
George III, the Duchess, one of the most 
amiable ladies of the day, the Duke of Beau- 
fort, and many others remained staunch to 
him as long as he lived. He was a sharer in 
the follies of his day, but so far as I know he 
was not so heartless in his vices as many a 
greater man ; nor did he pander to the vices 
of others. We can laugh at his absurdities, 
without having that feeling of disgust with 
which we regard many of the faults of his 
august rival, the Prince Regent. How 
delightful, for example, is his criticism of the 
Duke of Bedford's coat ! On one occasion his 
Grace asked the Beau his opinion of his new 
clothes. "Turn round, " said Brummell, "now 
stand still." Then taking the garment by 



182 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

the lapel, he exclaimed, "Oh, Bedford, do you 
call this a coat ?" 

The thing which strikes us most in connec- 
tion with the halcyon period of the dandies, 
with its follies and lavish expenditure, is 
that it coincided with some of the most 
anxious days through which England ever 
passed, and with the age when distress and 
poverty were most keenly felt. Fashionable 
life was indeed fast and furious and char- 
acterised by its reckless extravagance. Every- 
body gambled : every possible event was 
made the subject of a bet. The turf was, as 
it is to-day, crowded with blacklegs ; and the 
issue of a great fight in the prize ring was 
watched with more trembling anxiety than 
that of a battle in Spain or Flanders. The 
prevalence of drunkenness was universal ; 
every memoir of the time records drinking- 
bouts innumerable. The fine gentleman 
garnished every sentence with an oath and 
even used bad language in his letters to his 



LECTURE V 183 

friends. Duelling was universal. Pitt, the 
Duke of Wellington, Castlereagh, nearly all 
the leading statesmen, had to fight. Even 
the Duke of York, though very near the 
throne, ' met ' the Duke of Richmond. But 
with all its failings the men of fashion had one 
merit : though they were almost incredibly 
coarse, brutal, and selfish, no one could 
reproach them with softness. They may 
have been bad, but they were men. If 
they went to see prize-fighters beat each 
other into a jelly, they were ready enough to 
use their fists themselves. If they gambled the 
cards and the dice, they did so at the risk of 
ending their days in a debtor's prison. Many 
of them died ruined in purse and bankrupt 
even of honour. If they pursued their amours 
unscrupulously, there was always the risk 
of facing an outraged relative's pistol. The 
spice of danger was never absent from their 
lives. One alone could share in all their 
pursuits, and be exempt from peril. He could 



1 84 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

drink himself drunk without danger of his 
words being called in question ; he could 
ruin wives and daughters and no one would 
raise a hand against him ; he could engage in 
shady transactions on the turf, and men 
made it a point of honour to shield his fair 
fame. If others were extravagant, they 
dissipated their own patrimony ; and when 
that was gone, there was nothing for it but 
to starve. But he had only to fall back on 
national resources, and the taxpayer extri- 
cated him from his difficulties. It is because 
of its immunity, that the profligacy of George, 
as Prince, as Regent, and as King is so detest- 
able. 

It has been customary, I think, to under- 
rate his abilities. Thackeray has a most 
misleading passage about his relation with 
the Whigs. "At first he made a pretence of 
having Burke and Fox and Sheridan for his 
friends. But how could such men be seri- 
ous before such an empty scapegrace as this 



LECTURE V 185 

lad . . . ; what had these men of genius in 
common with their tawdry young host of 
Carlton House ? That fribble the leader 
of such men as Fox and Burke ! That 
man's opinions about the constitution — 
about any question graver than the button 
of a waistcoat or the sauce of a partridge 
worth anything ! The friendship between 
the Prince and the Whig Chiefs was impos- 
sible. They were hypocrites in pretending to 
respect him, and if he broke the hollow com- 
pact between them, who shall blame him?" 
But if we turn to Creevey, we shall see that 
George played the game with the Whigs 
with consummate skill. Not that he cared a 
straw for the constitution or political mat- 
ters. He wanted leisure, comfort, influence, — 
above all, money. He used the Whigs for 
his purposes in the question of the Regency, 
and in order to extort money from the 
nation. They were ready enough to serve 
him in defeating Pitt and their other oppo- 



1 86 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

nents ; but he, once he was Regent in 1812, 
with his father, the old King, hopelessly- 
insane, flung them aside as no longer useful 
and made the Tory government uphold the 
two things now to his interest to conserve, — 
the status quo and the power of the Crown. 

No one has ever doubted the power of 
fascination exercised by George, which was 
due not less to his clever adaptability, than 
to his high position. What reader of Lock- 
hart's "Life of Scott" can forget the dinner 
party when the King and Sir Walter exchanged 
mutual badinage in the freest manner ? 
We find the same in Creevey regarding the 
extreme affability with which he treated 
him and the Whig leaders at Brighton, when 
Prince Regent. George's charm of manner 
and the ease with which he could adapt him- 
self to his company and forget to all appear- 
ance his royal dignity in social intercourse 
was one of his most powerful political assets 
which he used to the fullest advantage. 



LECTURE V 187 

The influence exercised by him was almost 
wholly evil. Head of the state in the days 
of its greatest military glory, when the 
moral and political influence of England 
was paramount in Europe ; living in the 
days of great industrial and mechanical 
triumph, in which his country had the fullest 
share ; confronted as King with some of the 
gravest social problems, which its poets and 
philosophers were taxing their utmost to 
expose and remove, — the marvel is that any 
man could have occupied such a position, 
and yet interested himself almost exclusively 
in frivolous pleasures and sensual amours. 

I do not think that it is too harsh a verdict 
to say that George IV's example acted like 
a poison to the social life of several genera- 
tions. Vice was rampant enough in Eng- 
lish society before he came to manhood ; but 
his father had done much to set an example 
to his nobility of a pure domestic life, and 
to encourage simple tastes and pleasures. 



188 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

Gambling and profligacy went on despite 
the King ; but his son led the orgies of 
extravagance. His taste was atrocious. 
What can be more monstrous than the 
Pavilion at Brighton ? Read Thackeray's 
description of his coming of age fete at 
Carlton House, quoted from the European 
Magazine, 1784: "The saloon maybe styled 
the chef-d'oeuvre, and in every ornament dis- 
covers great invention. It is hung with a 
figured plush. ... The window curtains, 
sofas, and chairs are of the same colour. 
The ceiling is ornamented with emblematical 
paintings, representing the Graces and Muses, 
together with Jupiter, Mercury, and Apollo 
and Paris. Two ormolu chandeliers are 
placed here, etc., etc." 1 The coronation was 
a monstrous exhibition of extravagance. For 
the feast in Westminster Hall, where the 
Champion of England, "mounted on a horse, 
borrowed from Astley's theatre, rode into the 

1 Quoted from Thackeray's " Four Georges." 



LECTURE V 189 

Hall," more than eight hundred dozen of 
wine and one hundred gallons of punch were 
provided. Vulgarity distinguished the pe- 
riod of the ' First Gentleman in Europe.' 
Countless families were brought to ruin by 
association with him, and at no time that 
I can call did more eminent people die by 
their own hands. As Thackeray says : "There 
is no greater satire on that proud society . . . 
than that it admired George !" 

One episode which perhaps throws as much 
light as anything upon the manners and 
morals of the time is the trial of Caroline of 
Brunswick, the unhappy, if indiscreet, con- 
sort of George IV. Before making the at- 
tempt I am afraid I must go back to 1795, 
when the Prince of Wales, on the report of 
his not too refined sailor brother, decided 
to offer his hand to that princess. He got 
very well paid by the country for the sacri- 
fice. His income was raised from £60,000 
(#300,000) to £125,000 (#625,000) ; for the 



190 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

preparations for the wedding he got £27,000 
($135,000) ; a further grant of jewels and plate, 
or cash to buy them, £28,000 ($140,000). 
Then came £15,000 ($130,000) to complete 
Carlton House ; and the Princess, his wife, 
was in addition offered an allowance of £50,000 
($250,000) a year. For some reason — I 
should say she was the only princess who 
ever did so — Caroline accepted less than 
was offered as income; namely, £35,000 
($175,000). 

It is true George also wanted his debts, 
amounting to a trifle of £600,000 ($3,000,000) 
odd, paid, and failed to get it ; still, consider- 
ing the value of money in those days, and 
that times in England were worse than had 
been known, — wars, taxes, bad seasons, the 
poor in abject distress, Pitt distracted how to 
raise money, sedition rampant, and no very 
glorious period for the British arms, — he 
certainly did not sell himself cheap. Of the 
miserable marriage which ensued little need 



LECTURE V 191 

be said. From the time the Prince raised his 
bride, when she tried to kneel, and said to 
Lord Malmesbury, "Harris, I am not well; 
get me a glass of brandy," to her death 
twenty-six years later, it is one long discredit- 
able story. But I allude to it for a personal 
reason. 1 have myself seen two of the 
counsels of the Queen in the celebrated trial. 
Dr. Lushington was a friend of my family's, 
and I was at a school in Brighton which Lord 
Brougham used to visit ; and — I believe I 
am correct in saying this — I actually re- 
ceived one of the prizes when he gave them 
away. I certainly have a book on my shelves 
which, I fancy, I got on that occasion. It 
assuredly does not make a man feel young 
when he realises that he has seen and can 
remember men who not only witnessed but 
took a very prominent part in a trial which 
was held ninety-six years ago. 

Let me, however, recapitulate the events 
which led up to the great scene in the House 



192 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

of Lords. George as Prince of Wales hated 
his wife from the first, and after the birth of 
the Princess Charlotte refused to have any- 
thing to do with her. On April 30, 1796, 
the Prince wrote a letter to the Princess in 
which he said: "Our inclinations are not in 
our power, nor should either of us be held 
answerable to the other, because nature 
has not made us suitable to each other. . . . 
I shall now finally close this disagreeable 
correspondence, trusting that, as we have 
completely explained ourselves to each other, 
the rest of our lives will be passed in unin- 
terrupted tranquillity." 

To do George justice, his wife does not 
seem to have been attractive. He had excel- 
lent taste in dress and deportment ; and 
Caroline was far from being a model of refine- 
ment in appearance or manners, whilst her 
choice of company was never discreet. The 
old King always treated her with kindness 
and even affection, but he found it necessary 



LECTURE V 193 

to warn her to be more careful in the selec- 
tion of her society. In 1804 the Prince of 
Wales instituted a " Delicate Enquiry," which 
four Lords were appointed to conduct, with 
the result that the behaviour of the Princess 
was pronounced not unsatisfactory. In the 
years which followed there were constant 
quarrels and recriminations about the edu- 
cation of their daughter, the Princess Char- 
lotte of Wales, a high-spirited girl who stood 
up boldly to the ill treatment she received 
at her father's hands, and defended her 
mother. In 18 14 the Princess of Wales 
left England for her famous travels. Two 
years later the Princess Charlotte married 
Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, and settled down 
at Claremont, a beautiful place purchased 
for her by the nation. The young couple 
were thoroughly happy, the people looked 
forward to being one day ruled over by a 
beloved and virtuous queen. The incredible 
scandals of the family of George III were 



194 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

being forgotten, when the news came that 
the Princess was dead. 

I shall never get to the trial ! I must 
digress once more. What ensued was al- 
most farcical. Despite the fact that George 
III had an immense family, he had no grand- 
children. All his elderly sons hastened to 
get married. The Prince Regent was very 
little married to his wife, and very much so 
to various other ladies ; the Duke of York 
had married happily, and was, if not always 
faithful, a kindly husband ; but he had no 
family. The Duke of Cumberland had mar- 
ried a princess of whom the royal family 
disapproved, and perhaps he was more hated 
by the nation than any member of the house 
of Hanover. Among other things, many 
firmly believed that he was really guilty of 
the murder of his servant, Sellis. The idea 
of his coming to the throne was dreaded on 
all sides. But there was no lack of nominally 
unmarried Royal Dukes, — Clarence, Sussex, 



LECTURE V 195 

Kent, and Cambridge. The nearest persons 
to the succession, who had families, were the 
King of Wurtemburg, his brother, and their 
sister the Princess Frederica Buonaparte. 
It became necessary for the Royal Dukes to 
take wives in accordance with the Royal 
Marriage Act of 1772 ; J and, though they 
had not only themselves but other ladies 
and their children to consider, these noble 
princes presented themselves at the altar of 
Hymen. Not, however, without some fore- 
thought, as the following remarks of the 
Duke of Kent to his friend Mr. Creevey 
testify : 

The Duke thought that his brother Clar- 
ence would marry, but that his price would 
be too high for the ministers to accept, viz., 
"a settlement such as is proper for a prince 
who marries expressly for a succession to 
the Throne," and in addition the payment of 



1 Which made illegal any marriage contracted by a prince of the 
blood without the consent of King and Parliament. 



196 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

all his debts, and a handsome provision for 
each of his ten natural children. Kent, being 
next in the succession, was ready to do it 
cheaper. "It is now twenty-seven years 
that Madame St. Laurent and I have lived 
together, . . . and you may well imagine, 
Mr. Creevey, the pang it will occasion me to 
part with her." She need not have very 
much ; but a certain number of servants and 
a carriage are essentials. Being a "man of 
no ambition," the Duke of Kent wanted only 
£25,000 (#100,000) a year in addition to his 
present income if he took a wife — the same 
sum as York had when he married in 1792, — 
and Kent was generously prepared to make 
no further demands because of the decreased 
value of money since his brother's allowance 
was made. "As to the payment of my 
debts," he concluded, " I don't call them 
great. The nation, on the contrary, is greatly 
my debtor." So it is ; for he married, and 
became the father of Queen Victoria. 




LECTURE V 197 

The Princess Caroline had left England 
in 18 14 and had been touring in the Medi- 
terranean ever since. At first she was at- 
tended by some English in her suite ; but 
these gradually dropped off, leaving Her 
Royal Highness without any of her husband's 
subjects about her. We need not follow 
her in her travels or adventures. It is 
enough to say that she visited very out-of- 
the-way places and mixed with the sort of 
people no ordinary lady, not to say a royal 
Princess, could be expected to meet. She 
loaded her courier, Bergami, with honours 
and favours, she founded an order of knight- 
hood when she visited Jerusalem and made 
him Grand Master. She had procured for 
him the title of Baron. Her conduct and 
the familiarities she permitted were, to say 
the least, indiscreet. Undoubtedly she had 
laid herself open to a serious charge of mis- 
conduct. 

The Prince Regent resolved to do his best 



198 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

to get rid of his hated wife by trying to 
obtain a divorce. But not only law but also 
public opinion was against this. He had 
driven his wife away with every possible 
insult, he had kept her apart from her 
daughter, the Queen, his mother, had refused 
to receive her as Princess of Wales at court. 
And if, in desperation, Caroline had failed 
in her duty, Europe rang with stories of the 
immorality of the Regent, and the common 
people were heart and soul on the side of his 
wife. As a divorce seemed hopeless, attempts 
were made to bribe Caroline to renounce 
her titles and live on a large income out of 
England. Matters came to a climax when 
George III died. If George IV was King, 
his wife was Queen of England ; and she was 
resolved to return to the country and main- 
tain her rights. 

This miserable matrimonial squabble with 
all its sordid details rapidly assumed the 
dimensions of a political struggle which rent 



LECTURE V 199 

the country in twain. The Whigs had never 
forgiven George for using them as long as he 
was Prince of Wales and throwing them 
over when he became Regent in 18 12. They 
therefore espoused the cause of the Queen ; 
and as far as possible — for they had little 
admiration of her conduct — defended her. 
The Whig lawyers rallied to her cause, 
notably Henry Brougham, who, despite his 
great talents, had suffered from the exclu- 
siveness of the great Whig families. As a 
parvenu, high political office was closed to 
Brougham, but the case of the Queen gave 
him an unrivalled chance as a lawyer. More 
honest and unselfish and almost as useful 
to Queen Caroline was Alderman Wood, a 
prominent citizen of London, who more than 
once filled the office of Lord Mayor. De- 
spised by the polite society of the time, 
called by the King, with his usual delicacy, 
"that beast Wood," the alderman under- 
stood better than anyone the effect of the 



200 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

Queen's return to the country. He knew 
that, however great her indiscretions, her 
wrongs would win her popular sympathy, 
and that her courage in facing her accusers 
would be sure to range the nation on her 
side. That he was no vulgar demagogue is 
attested by the facts that the royal family 
often sought his counsel ; that it is due to 
his advice that Queen Victoria was born in 
England ; and that he was the first baronet 
she created shortly after her accession to 
the throne. But of all the Queen's friends 
there is no one who was more honest and 
faithful than that gaunt Scotch spinster, 
the Lady Ann Hamilton, whose memoirs 
were published when she was very old, with- 
out her consent and greatly to her distress. 
The daughter of the Duke of Hamilton and 
sister to the radical Lord Archibald Hamil- 
ton, she was six foot high, awkward and un- 
gainly, and an object of ridicule to Caroline 
and her friends. They called her Joan of 



LECTURE V 201 

Arc, and shewed her no consideration and 
little courtesy. Yet in her hours of trial 
Caroline had no truer or stauncher friend. 
Her " Secret History of the Court of Eng- 
land," published under the circumstances 
to which I have alluded, is extraordinarily 
scurrilous, but it reflects the fierceness of 
party spirit which animated the Whig fac- 
tion ; and I may have to recur to it. 

George III died on January 29, 1820. The 
first act of his successor was to refuse to 
allow the new Queen's name to appear in 
the prayer for the Royal family. But on 
the 7th of June Her Majesty entered London. 
The road from Westminster Bridge to Green- 
wich was thronged with spectators. "She 
travelled," says Grenville, "in an open lan- 
dau, Alderman Wood by her side and Lady 
Ann Hamilton and another woman opposite. 
Everybody was disgusted at the vulgarity 
of Wood sitting in the place of honour, 
whilst the Duke of Hamilton's sister was 



202 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

sitting backwards in the carriage." ... "It 
is impossible," he adds, "to conceive the 
sensation created by this event. Nobody 
either blames or approves of this sudden 
return, but all ask, What will be done next ? 
How is it to end ?" 

Events moved rapidly. The Prime Minis- 
ter, Lord Liverpool, produced the famous 
green bag, full of incriminating documents, in 
the House of Lords, but the Queen did not 
flinch. It was even proposed to bring her to 
trial under the fourteenth century act of 
treasons, 23 Edw. III. 

Finally, however, the King's advisers 
determined, not to try the Queen, but to 
introduce a bill into the House of Lords 
depriving her of all royal titles and dignities 
and divorcing her from her husband. But 
in order to carry the bill an investigation 
into her conduct was necessary, so that she 
was practically, if not actually, tried. 

I propose to ask you to follow the Queen's 



LECTURE V 203 

case in Creevey's notes, and I think we shall 
gather from them something of the interest 
with which people watched it. 

The trial began on Aug. 17 ; and Creevey 
thus describes the entry of the Queen. "To 
describe to you her appearance and manner 
is far beyond my powers. I had been taught 
to believe she was as much improved in looks 
as in dignity of manners ; it is therefore with 
much pain I am obliged to observe that the 
nearest resemblance I can recollect to this 
much injured lady is a toy which you used 
to call Fanny Royde. There is another toy 
of a rabbit or a cat, whose tail you squeeze 
under its body, and then out it jumps in half 
a minute off the ground into the air. The 
first of these toys you must suppose to repre- 
sent the person of the Queen ; the latter the 
manner by which she popped all at once into 
the House, made a duck at the throne, an- 
other to the Peers, and a concluding jump 
into the chair which was placed for her. 



204 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

Lady Ann Hamilton was behind the Queen, 
leaning on her brother Archy's arm. . . . 
She is full six feet high and bears a striking 
resemblance to one of Lord Derby's great 
deer." 

Brougham and Denman both spoke for the 
Queen, and she was better received on the next 
day, the 18th. Creevey went off to his club 
and wrote : "Nothing can be more triumphant 
for the Queen than this day altogether. . . . 
The Law Officers of the Crown are damnably 
overweighted by Brougham and Denman." 
The next day the facts adduced by the 
Attorney General made things look bad. 
A less numerous and reputable crowd ap- 
peared to cheer the Queen on the 226.. 
"Now," writes Creevey, "her danger begins." 
But then things began to mend ; the witness 
in whom the prosecution had most confi- 
dence was a certain Teodoro Majocchi. 
Brougham forced him to contradict himself, 
and seeing how he was being driven into ad- 



LECTURE V 205 

missions, the witness continually replied, Non 
mi ricordo, " I don't remember," a phrase 
which became for a time proverbial. There 
were very few English witnesses, but when 
Creevey, on Aug. 25, mentioned this to the 
Duke of Wellington, his Grace replied, "Ho! 
but we have a great many English witnesses — 
officers." "And this was the thing," writes 
Creevey, "which frightened me most." On 
the 26th the evidence of a chambermaid gave 
trouble, and Creevey is angry with the Queen. 
"This," to quote him, "gives consider- 
able — indeed very great advantage — to the 
case of that eternal fool, to call her (the 
Queen) no worse name." A few days later, 
Sept. 8, he calls her "the idiot." — The 
next day the House adjourned till the 3d 
October, and the divorce clause was dropped. 
Creevey remarks that now the Bill of Pains 
and Penalties was really directed against the 
King: its object being "to declare the 
Queen an abandoned woman, and the King 



206 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

a fit associate for her!" When the House 
sat on Oct. 3, Mr. Brougham made his great 
speech for the defence. On the 6th it came 
out that the husband of the Queen's friend, 
Lady Charlotte Lindsay, had sold his wife's 
letters to the Treasury. On the 9th Creevey 
reports "the town literally drunk with joy 
at the unparalleled triumph of the Queen." 
But at 4 p.m. the weather changed. Two 
Naval officers, Flynn and Hownam, were 
called for the defence, and broke down under 
cross examination, so that the Queen's guilt 
became almost certain. Then the govern- 
ment lost its advantage by committing the 
mistake of letting a witness, who was to have 
been indicted for perjury, leave the coun- 
try. On the 13 th the Duke of Norfolk wrote 
to Creevey, saying that "if this horrible 
bill" passed, he would feel no regret that as 
a Roman Catholic he could not take his seat 
as a Peer. At last, on Oct. 24, the trial was 
nearing its end and Denman began to sum 



LECTURE V 207 

up. The attack he made on the King and 
the Duke of Clarence, who had been espe- 
cially bitter against the Queen, is a striking 
example of the freedom allowed to a British 
advocate. He compared the case to the 
dismissal of the virtuous Octavia by Nero 
and the examination of her servants by his 
infamous minister, Tigellinus. 

He looked at the Duke of Clarence and 
declared that he ought to come forward as 
a witness and not whisper slanders against 
Caroline. The Queen, he said, might well 
exclaim, "Come forth, thou slanderer, and 
let me see thy face ! If thou would'st equal 
the respectability of an Italian witness, come 
forth and depose in open court. As thou 
art, thou art worse than an Italian assassin ! 
Because, while I am boldly and manfully 
meeting my accusers, thou art plunging a 
dagger unseen into my bosom.' , 

In his peroration Denman made a most 
unlucky slip, but he faithfully reproduced 



208 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

the irrational attitude of public opinion. 1 
The people believed the Queen guilty and 
yet desired her acquittal. She had suffered 
so cruelly, she had been so shamefully treated, 
her ruin had been sought by employing 
spies against her, her accusers were worse 
than she. So Denman quoted the divine 
words to less guilty accusers of a sinful 
woman — "Go and sin no more," — where- 
upon a wag wrote : 

" Most gracious Queen, we thee implore 
To go away and sin no more; 
But if that effort be too great, 
To go away, at any rate." 

Then followed the debate, and on the 6th 
of November, even with the aid of eleven 
of the bishops, there was a majority of only 
28 in favour of the Bill of Pains and Penalties. 
The feeling of the peers was in accordance with 
Denman's peroration. Caroline was guilty 

1 1 am informed by a friend, Mr. Denman, a grandson of Caroline's 
Counsel, that the words were not used in the speech, which was 
reported wrongly in the Annual Register. 



LECTURE V 209 

but ought not to be punished. Said Lord 
Ellenborough : "No man who had heard the 
evidence would say that the Queen of Eng- 
land was not the last woman in the country 
which a man of honour would wish his wife 
to resemble, or the father of a family would 
recommend as an example to his daughters." 
{Loud cheers.) But he voted against the 
bill. On Nov. 8 it was proposed that the 
divorce clause should be tacked on to the 
bill. Creevey writes (Nov. 10) : " Three times 
three ! if you please, before you read a word 
further. — The Bill has gone, thank God ! 
to the devil. Their majority was brought 
down to 9 . . . and then the dolorous Liver- 
pool came forward and struck. He moved 
that his own bill be read this day six months. " 
"I was a bad boy," he writes next morning, 
"and drank an extra bottle of claret with 
Foley, Dundas, etc." I need not tell the 
rest of poor Caroline's story, how public 
feeling calmed down, especially when Parlia- 



210 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

merit voted her £50,000 ($250,000) a year. 
How she tried to attend the Coronation, how 
she died, and the King ordered the body not 
to be taken through London, and how the 
people rose and forced the funeral procession 
to pass through the city, how at last she 
found rest among her ancestors in her native 
Brunswick. Time will not permit me to do 
more than allude to George's visit to Ireland 
at the very time his injured wife was dying, 
and his speech: "This is one of the happiest 
days of my life. I have long wished to visit 
you. My heart has always been Irish. Go 
and do by me as I shall do by you. Go and 
drink my health in a bumper. I shall drink 
all yours in a bumper of Irish whiskey." 

Well might Byron celebrate the occasion 
of the Irish visit and the King's tumultuous 
welcome : 

"Is it madness or meanness which clings to thee now? 
Were he God — as he is but the commonest clay, 
With scarce fewer wrinkles than sins on his brow — 



LECTURE V 211 

Such servile devotion might shame him away. 
Ay, roar in his train ! Let their orators lash 
Their fanciful spirit to pamper his pride." 

I am afraid I have occupied much time 
with this famous trial. Had I told you the 
evidence in the least detail I should only 
have inspired disgust. Nor should I have 
selected the subject except for a special 
reason. 

Though no results immediately followed, 
even though George IV recovered his popu- 
larity in a measure, — for he was a very 
clever and could be a very charming man, — 
yet the very fact that the bill was introduced 
into the House of Lords ranged public opinion 
against that branch of the Legislature as 
nothing previously seemed to have done. 
It brought about the time when the days of 
the aristocracy as the sole influence in gov- 
ernment were to be numbered. Peers were 
no longer to be allowed the enormous privi- 
leges they had enjoyed. They had ranged 



212 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

themselves on the side of the throne in an 
unjust cause, — not because they cared for 
the King, — but because they considered their 
interests and his to be identical. The Reform 
Bill of 1832 was the answer of the English 
middle class to the Bill of Pains and Penalties 
of 1820. 



LECTURE VI 

Social Abuses as Exposed by Charles 
Dickens 

Let us revel in the company of a writer 

who has been perhaps even more appreciated 

in America than in his own country : and 

will you allow me to express my opinion 

that the greatest proof of the magnanimity 

of your fathers was shown in the fact that 

they forgave " Martin Chuzzlewit," and took 

its author to their heart ? No little man, and 

for that matter little nation, can bear to be 

caricatured. Many even who possess true 

greatness cannot endure ridicule. It must 

remain to the eternal credit of your country 

that Charles Dickens was beloved by it. 

Nowhere did the creator of "our Elijah Po- 

gram," Hannibal Chollop, Mrs. Hominy, and 

213 



214 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

Mr. Scadder find a warmer welcome than in 
the country where he discovered their pro- 
totypes ; and his popularity in America is 
a testimony to the good humour and gen- 
erosity of its people. 

My object in this lecture is to endeavour 
to explain the England which Dickens de- 
scribed ; and I will with your permission pref- 
ace my remarks by pointing out some of 
the disadvantages of an old society, bearing 
in mind its advantages also. The England 
in which Dickens worked was in many re- 
spects simpler in life, yet more fertile in 
types of character, than it is at present. I 
cannot but think that people got more pleas- 
ure out of living than they do in our days. 
Yet if I may venture upon a paradox, the 
world of " Pickwick " was older, and not 
younger, than the one in which we are living. 

Strictly speaking, modern England is not 
an " old" country, but a new one. Steam and 
electricity, the progress of science and the 



LECTURE VI 215 

advance of democratic ideas have inaugu- 
rated a new age ; and we, as well as you in 
America, live in days of experiment rather 
than of tradition. But the England of the 
thirties was an old country. It was changing 
rapidly, it is true ; yet it is scarce an exagger- 
ation to say that it bore a greater resemblance 
to the England of Queen Elizabeth than to 
that of the present day ; but the institutions 
of the past, which had changed very little 
in character, had become more intolerable as 
civilisation advanced ; and, consecrated by 
time, they pressed very heavily on the many 
to the great benefit of the few interested in 
their maintenance. 

The main thesis I shall put before you to- 
day is that it is time that an edition of Dickens 
appeared with a good popular commentary ; 
for much of it is not intelligible even to an 
English reader at the present day : and one 
thing which the volumes should have is a 
map of the London which he is so fond of 



216 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

describing. Most of the sites have become 
so changed as to be hardly recognisable ; 
and the appearance of the streets is so altered 
that one can hardly reconstruct them even 
in imagination. It would be no difficult task 
to find plans and pictures to assist one in 
this direction, and the result would, I think, 
be most illuminating to the reader. The 
prisons, for example, of which we read so 
much, the Fleet, the Marshalsea, Newgate 
itself, have all disappeared, and few now 
know even where the two former actually 
stood. As to the notes and comments which 
might be written, I hope this lecture may 
indicate what I mean. 

The first novel I shall take is " Oliver 
Twist " because it — despite the charm of the 
story — is almost unintelligible to the ordi- 
nary reader, where it deals with the conditions 
of the lives of the very poor and of the crim- 
inal classes. I need hardly remind you of 
the details. There is the poor little boy born 



LECTURE VI 217 

and bred in the workhouse under Mr. Bumble 
the beadle, his being apprenticed, his escape to 
London, and his introduction to the thieves , 
school kept by the Jew Fagin, the devilish 
plot to make him a criminal, his escape, and 
his restoration to his family. A character 
like Fagin's would be impossible in London 
at the present day. There may be equally 
dangerous criminals ; but he was protected 
by a system which is now happily entirely 
obsolete. His infamous trade was to train 
up criminals whom he finally handed over to 
the arm of the law. 

"I say," said the other (the landlord of 
the Cripple), "what a time this would be for 
a sell. I've got Phil Barker here : so drunk 
that a boy might take him." "Aha ! but it's 
not Phil Barker's time," said the Jew, look- 
ing up. "Phil has something more to do, 
before we can afford to part with him, so 
go back to the company, my dear, and tell 



218 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

them to lead merry lives — while they last, 
ha! ha! ha!" 

And again : 

"Change it," exclaimed the Jew (to 
Nancy). ... "I will change it! Listen to 
me, you drab. Listen to me, who with six 
words can strangle Sykes, as surely as if I had 
his bull's throat between my fingers now. If 
he comes back and leaves that boy behind 
him, — if he gets off free, and dead or alive 
fails to restore him to me — murder him 
yourself if you would have him escape Jack 
Ketch : and do it the moment he sets foot 
in this room, or mind me, it will be too late !" 

These were no empty boasts. Fagin had 
literally the lives of all who thieved for him 
in his pocket, and this is the motive of the 
plot of the story. The object of Fagin 
is to get Oliver Twist to commit some crime 
and thus be able to hand him over to the 



LECTURE VI 219 

police as soon as it was convenient to do so. 
Let us see how this could be managed. There 
were practically no police. London was pro- 
tected by a horse patrol in the suburbs 
and a small foot patrol in the streets. Each 
parish had its own watchman, who might 
not under any circumstances leave his beat, 
not even to prevent a felony. The parish 
constable or headborough was paid a ridicu- 
lous wage : in the great parish of Shoreditch 
he received £4.10.0 ($22.50) a year. Yet 
it was, what with blackmail and fees, a lucra- 
tive office. If the headborough prosecuted, 
he could get expenses at the rate of $6 a 
day and more, and he could bring in any other 
friend who held the same office as a witness 
— expenses paid. 

Crime was prevented by encouraging 
informers. A man could get £40 ($200) 
for information which led to a capital con- 
viction, and he could sell the exemption which 
he also gained from serving in a public office 



220 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

in the parish for a similar sum. It became 
actually in the interest of the thief takers to 
allow young persons and even children to 
commit minor crimes in the hope that sooner 
or later they would be guilty of worse offences. 
It was naturally the prime object of the in- 
former to obtain a conviction. Fagin com- 
bined the work of a receiver of stolen goods 
with that of a thief taker. 

The administration of the workhouse sys- 
tem was equally bad. The humour with 
which Dickens describes Mr. Bumble the 
beadle, his pomposity, his courtship of the 
matron, and his fall, is delightful ; but Mr. 
Bumble, the visiting magistrates, and the 
overseers of the poor represented a state 
of things almost unthinkable in its brutality. 
Oliver himself was nearly being apprenticed 
to a sweep who would certainly have treated 
him much as Crabbe's " Peter Grimes " treated 
his apprentice, and this dialogue between 
Mr. Bumble and Mrs. Mann, the nurse of 



LECTURE VI 221 

the pauper children, reveals the spirit with 
which the indigent poor were treated. 

"Mrs. Mann, I am going to London." 

"Lawk, Mr. Bumble," said Mrs. Mann, 
starting back. 

"To London, ma'am," resumed the inflex- 
ible beadle, "by coach. I and two paupers, 
Mrs. Mann ! A legal action is a-coming on, 
and the board has appointed me — me, Mrs. 
Mann — to depose to the matter at Clerken- 
well. . . ." 

"You are going by coach, Sir ? I thought 
it was always usual to send them paupers in 
carts." 

"That's when they're ill, Mrs. Mann," 
said the beadle. "We put sick paupers in 
carts in rainy weather, to prevent their 
taking cold." 

"Oh," said Mrs. Mann. 

"The opposition coach contracts for these 
two ; and takes them cheap," said Mr. 



222 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

Bumble. " They are both in a very low state, 
and we find it would come two pounds 
cheaper to move 'em than to bury them — 
that is, if we can throw 'em upon another 
parish, which I think we shall be able to do, 
if they don't die upon the road to spite us. 
Ha! Ha! Ha!" When Mr. Bumble had 
laughed a little his eyes again encountered 
the cocked hat ; and he became grave. 1 

Here is fiction : let us turn to facts as we 
find them in a history of the England of 
the period : 

The parish had the right to apprentice 
the children of poor parents to any trade. 
. . . Children under this law might be 
sent to any part of the Kingdom. "It is a 

1 The question of the domicile or " settlement " of paupers was the 
cause of endless litigation. See Mr. Blake Odgers' lecture V in "A 
Century of Law Reform." He quotes a judgment in 1724 which has 
been preserved in rhyme. 
"A woman, having a 'settlement,' married a man with none. 

The question was, he being dead, if what she had is gone. 

Quoth Sir John Pratt, the 'settlement' suspended did remain, 

Living the husband ; but, him dead, it doth revive again." 



LECTURE VI 223 

very common practice," wrote Romilly in 
181 1, "with the great populous parishes in 
London to bind children in large numbers 
to the proprietors of cotton mills ... at 
a distance of 200 miles. . . . The children, 
who are sent off by waggon loads at a time, 
are as much lost for ever to their parents 
as if they were shipped off for the West 
Indies. The parishes that bind them get 
rid of them for ever, and the poor children 
have not a human being in the world to whom 
they can look up for redress . . . from these 
wholesale dealers whose object it is to get 
everything that they can wring from their 
excessive labours and fatigue. . . . Instances 
(and not very few) have occurred in our 
criminal tribunals of wretches who have 
murdered their parish apprentices that they 
might get fresh premiums with new appren- 
tices." Some manufacturers, it is shocking 
to state, agreed to take one idiot for every 
nineteen sane children. 



224 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

Even naturally humane men were found 
to defend these dreadful abuses in the House 
of Commons. Here is an extract from a 
speech: "Although in the higher ranks of 
society it was true that to cultivate the affec- 
tions of children for their family was the 
source of every virtue, yet it was not so among 
the lower orders. ... It would be highly 
injurious to the public to put a stop to the 
binding of so many apprentices to the cotton 
manufacturers, as it must necessarily raise 
the price of labour and enhance the price of 
cotton manufactured goods !" 

We turn next to the debtor's prison which 
is so prominent in the " Pickwick Papers." 
So resolute was Mr. Pickwick not to submit 
to the judgment against him in the famous 
trial that he allowed himself to be imprisoned 
in the Fleet. He was first put into the 
Warden's room with several other prisoners. 
When he entered the room, the others were 
absent. "So he sat down on the foot of his 



LECTURE VI 225 

little iron bedstead, and began to wonder 
how much a year the warden made out of the 
dirty room. Having satisfied himself, by 
mathematical calculation, that the apartment 
was about equal in annual value to a freehold 
in a small street in the suburbs of London/' 
etc., etc. 

Here we have one of the great abuses of 
the horrible " debtor's prisons" in London. 
They were jobbed by the officials, and the 
bare decencies of life could only be obtained 
by a heavy payment. The warders charged 
£1.1.0. on entrance for "garnish," which was 
supposed to provide coals, candles, brooms, 
etc., and exorbitant fees were demanded for 
rooms. The state of those who could not 
pay was deplorable. In the prison of the 
Court of Requests at Birmingham, according 
to the Parliamentary papers of 1844, eight 
years after "Pickwick" was written, the male 
prisoners slept in an attic eleven feet long 
by sixteen broad on platforms littered with 



226 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

loose straw. For exercise, at Kidderminster 
they walked in a yard thirteen yards square ; 
and their room was without even a fireplace. 
For food they were allowed one quarter of 
a loaf of bread and were allowed two jugfuls 
of water for drinking and washing. 

In 1827 nearly 6000 persons in London 
were imprisoned for debt. We read con- 
stantly in Dickens of Chancery prisoners, 
especially in "Little Dorrit" ; men who had 
been thrown into gaol to rot there for years 
because they could not pay for suits in which 
they had been quite unwillingly involved. 
The absurdity of the system was enhanced 
by the fact that they were deprived of any 
chance of working to pay their debts. Many 
were forgotten and left literally to rot. 
They were not even allowed to escape by 
bankruptcy ; for unless a man failed in 
trade he could not claim that relief, nor 
could his property be divided among his 
creditors. The law thus gave no means of 



LECTURE VI 227 

escape to the debtor nor of payment to the 
creditor. 

Imprisonment for debt was not abolished in 
England till 1869 ; and it is now only allowed 
by order of the court in the case of small 
debts which people can but will not pay. 

The horrors of the prisons which Howard 
and Elizabeth Fry, for all their gallant ef- 
forts, were powerless to remove, gave rise to 
a wave of public sentiment which carried 
their administration to an opposite extreme. 
Dickens saw this and exposed the folly of the 
movement in " David Copperfield." You will 
doubtless remember that David's old school- 
master, Mr. Creakle, of Salem House, suddenly 
developed from a brutal pedagogue into an 
ardent philanthropist, after having become a 
Middlesex magistrate, and devoted himself to 
the well-being of criminals. Copperfield, as 
the rising author of the day (Dickens him- 
self), is invited to see a new model prison and 
takes his old friend Traddles with him. 



228 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

"It was an immense and solid building, 
erected at a vast expense. I could not help 
thinking, as we approached the gate, what 
an uproar would have been made in the 
country, if any deluded man had proposed 
to spend one half the money on the erection 
of an industrial school for the young or a 
house of refuge for the deserving old. In 
the kitchen repasts were being prepared 
for the prisoners, so delicate that none of 
our soldiers, sailors, labourers, or workmen 
could hope ever to dine half so well." 

There, in a most comfortable cell, our 
friends find Uriah Heep reading a hymn 
book, canting and complaining of the tough- 
ness of the beef; and Mr. Littimer, Steer- 
forth's infamous valet, gently hinting that 
the milk supplied might have been adulter- 
ated. To illustrate this I turned to the old 
numbers of Punch of the day, a study of 
which, comic paper though it be, is one of 
the best illustrations of the current life and 



LECTURE VI 229 

thought of every period since it appeared in 
1839. There one finds innumerable jokes 
and pictures of convicts enjoying every sort 
of luxury, obsequiously waited on by the 
warders. Prison reform had to be irrational 
before it could become sane ; for, as David 
Copperfield says, "Perhaps it is a good thing 
to have an unsound hobby ridden hard ; for 
it's the sooner ridden to death." 

Next we come to an abuse, on which I 
must speak with much diffidence, for no one 
but a trained lawyer could properly discuss 
it — the Court of Chancery. It is the theme 
of much of Dickens' best work and is the 
whole motive of " Bleak House " and the 
famous Jarndyce and Jarndyce lawsuit. The 
mixture of humour and pathos in the treatment 
of this subject tempts me to digress a little 
before explaining as best I may the actual 
state of the law at the time. We are intro- 
duced to those who were interested in the 
vast machinery of the Court of Chancery, 



230 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

as the great Jarndyce case drags its slow 
length along from the Lord Chancellor down 
to the starving law writer. We see suitors 
of every description like the "man from 
Shropshire" and "Miss Flyte." We seem to 
smell the musty law papers as we read the 
book. I confess to feeling almost maddened 
by the callous slowness with which Mr. 
Vholes the solicitor, who "maintained an 
aged father in the Vale of Taunton," played 
with the hopes and fears of the anxious 
suitors. The eminent respectability of such 
a practitioner, adds Dickens, was always 
quoted whenever a commission sat to see 
whether the business of the Court could be 
expedited. We laugh, but the tears are not 
far off, at the humour of such people as 
Miss Flyte, Mr. Gruppy, Conversation Kenge ; 
yet we feel the pathos of all the woe and dis- 
appointment caused by the delays of the 
monstrous machine of the Law. 

To Dickens the Court of Chancery repre- 



LECTURE VI 231 

sented two things : first it stood for oppres- 
sion. It appeared to him a vast system 
backed by vested interests, which sucked 
unhappy suitors into litigation against their 
will, fettered and crippled them for the rest 
of their lives, and, in many cases, ultimately 
consigned them to the despairing misery of 
a debtor's prison. 

It drove men and women to madness, 
like poor Miss Flyte, or made them misan- 
thropes, like Mr. Grindley, "the man from 
Shropshire." It made wretched, half-ruined 
people hang about the courts day after day 
expecting a judgment, it caused houses to 
fall into ruin, and whole streets to become 
deserted because Chancery could not decide 
to whom they belonged. Listen to " the 
man from Shropshire's" description of his 
own case : 

"Mr. Jarndyce, consider my case. As 
there is a heaven above us, this is my case. 
I am one of two brothers. My father (a 



232 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

farmer) made a will and left his farm and 
stock to my mother for her life. After my 
mother's death, all was to come to me, 
except a legacy of £300 that I was to pay to 
my brother." 

The brother claimed the legacy, Grindley 
said he had had some of it, and the brother 
filed a bill in Chancery. 

" Seventeen persons were made defendants 
in this simple suit." Two years elapsed and 
the Master in Chancery then found there 
ought to be another defendant, and all the 
proceedings were quashed. "The costs at 
that time — before the suit had begun, were 
three times the legacy." 

The brother tried to back out, but the 
court would not let him. The whole prop- 
erty was sucked away in a suit which common 
sense could have decided in a day. 

The demoralising effect of a court so dila- 
tory and so capricious also revealed itself in 
its influence on character. Men and women 



LECTURE VI 233 

spent their lives in waiting for a decision 
and found it impossible to settle to any- 
regular calling. 

The court was, in fact, like a gigantic lot- 
tery. A favourable decision might make a 
man wealthy in a day, and with such a prospect 
it was impossible for him to settle down to the 
drudgery of a profession. In addition to this, 
so conflicting were the interests involved that 
families were divided hopelessly. 

How pathetically does Dickens sketch the 
character of Richard Carstone ! He tries 
physic, the army, the law, and cannot stick 
to any as his vocation. He feels that at 
any time the Jarndyce case may make him 
a rich man. His only hope is to drive it to 
a conclusion. Under the influence of Mr. 
Vholes he learns to distrust his old friend 
Mr. John Jarndyce, and even, in part, his 
betrothed, the sweet Ada, because they too 
have interests in the suit. When the case 
comes to an end by all the money being 



234 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

absorbed in costs, he dies, despairing yet 
penitent. 

Let us now see how the bare facts, stripped 
of romance, appear. 

The Court of Chancery represents Equity, 
which is, ideally, law in its highest aspect, 
regarded not as interpreted by statute or 
custom but from the standpoint of justice 
tempered by mercy. As such Equity came 
to be regarded as more important than 
Common law ; and the Chancery overshad- 
owed the other courts. The Chancellor rose 
constantly in importance, and as the chief 
of the King's chaplains and his adviser in 
the exercise of the prerogative of mercy he be- 
came " the keeper of the King's conscience." 
As time went on, Equity like Common law 
was based on precedent, and its original 
purpose fell into the background. The busi- 
ness of the Chancery was continually on 
the increase, and it finally became utterly 
unmanageable. Protracted law suits are cer- 



LECTURE VI 235 

tainly no new thing and in the 15th century 
there are, I believe, examples of interminable 
litigation. At an early date, the "law's 
delay " had passed into a proverb ; and 
nothing was done to remedy the growing 
evil. The Lord Chancellor and the Master 
of the Rolls were the only available judges ; 
and as population increased and conditions 
of life became more complicated, the griev- 
ances of the wretched suitors in Chancery 
became intolerable. As you know, in the 
prize ring, when a boxer had got his adver- 
sary into a hopeless position and could treat 
him as he liked, the beaten man was said to 
be "in chancery." 

It is generally supposed that the Chan- 
cellor in " Bleak House " is the famous Lord 
Eldon, whose tenure of that exalted office 
is almost the longest on record. He was a 
man of many virtues and singularly kind- 
hearted, — the description of his reception of 
the wards in Chancery in the book before 



236 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

us does ample justice to this trait — and as 
a lawyer he ranks among the very foremost 
exponents of the law of England. But he 
knew and valued the merits of the legal 
system ; and despite the fact of many cases 
of individual hardship, these were many, 
and he was so anxious to give judgments in 
exact accordance with the law that he had 
great difficulty in making up his mind. As 
a matter of fact a judgment by Lord Eldon 
is even now accepted in your country as well 
as mine : but his conscientious thoroughness 
was a great drawback in delaying the con- 
gested business of the court. I will now give 
some formal examples of the condition of 
the Chancery, taken from Spencer Walpole's 
" History of England from a.d. 18 16." 

But first let me quote Dean Swift's de- 
scription of the law's delay a century earlier. 
It is of course a caricature : but his satire is so 
pungent and his wit so satirical that I cannot 
resist the temptation of using his famous book. 



LECTURE VI 237 

Swift makes Gulliver explain the law of 
England to the Houyhnhnms, the horses who 
rule over the human Yahoos. 

"It is a maxim among these lawyers that 
whatever hath been done may be legally 
done again ; and therefore they take special 
care to record all the decisions made against 
common justice and the general reason of 
mankind. These, under the name of pre- 
cedents, they produce as authorities, to justify 
the most iniquitous opinions, and the judges 
never fail of directing accordingly. 

" In pleading they studiously avoid enter- 
ing into the merits of a case ; but are loud, 
violent, and tedious, in dwelling on all cir- 
cumstances which are not to the purpose. 
For instance, in the case already mentioned 
(a claim to a cow) they never desire to know 
what claim or title my adversary hath to 
my cow ; but whether the said cow were 
red or black; her horns long or short ; whether 
the field I graze her in be round or square ; 



238 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

whether she was milked at home or abroad ; 
what diseases she is subject to and the like ; 
after which they consult precedents, adjourn 
the cause from time to time, and in ten, 
twenty, or thirty years come to an issue/' 

Here is a typical undefended Chancery 
suit. A will which came into force in 1819 
contained bequests to charities. These lega- 
cies were contrary to the Mortmain laws, 
and were consequently void. The heir-at- 
law filed a bill in Chancery to make them so. 
During 1820 the trustees of the charities 
put in their answers. In 1821 the case was 
referred to the Master in Chancery to find 
out who was the heir at law. By 1823 he 
was ready with an answer, and the court 
directed him to give an account of the prop- 
erty. He did so in 1824. In 1825 the 
case was set down for further directions ; 
in 1826 the Master was told to ascertain the 
children of the testator's half-nephews. This 



LECTURE VI 239 

took till 1828, when the case was reported to 
the House of Commons. The Master was 
then still pursuing his enquiries. A defended 
case was naturally slower. The case was 
referred to the Master in Chancery ; he re- 
ported : exceptions were then taken to his 
report, and so on. In about ten years some- 
thing probably occurred to make it necessary 
to begin again. The Masters were paid by 
fees and were interested in making a case 
last. Their incomes often amounted to as 
much as from £3000 ($15,000) to £4000 
($20,000) a year. The amount of law 
copying was prodigious. In one case it 
came to 10,497 folios, for which a charge 
of six shillings and eight pence ($1.60) for 
each folio was made. You recollect the 
poor captain who sunk to the position of 
a law-copying clerk. Be sure he was not 
paid at this rate. 

Such then were a few of the abuses of one 
branch of the legal system which Dickens 



240 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

exposed. They have in the main been dis- 
posed of since 1873. We cannot, however, 
leave the subject without a few words on 
his inexhaustible fertility in drawing the 
characters of lawyers. 

The profession is represented throughout. 
We see Mr. Justice Stareleigh trying Mr. 
Pickwick and waking up at intervals. Who 
can forget the cross-examination of Sam 
Weller. 

" ' Is it a good place ? ' " Sam is asked. Yes, 
Sir. "Little to do and plenty to get,' said 
Sergeant Buzfuz jocularly. * Plenty to get, 
as the soldier said when they gave him six 
dozen/ replied Sam. 'You mustn't tell us 
what the soldier or anybody else said,' re- 
marked the judge, waking up suddenly. 'It 
is not evidence.' ' Immortal too are the 
counsel in that famous case, the eloquent 
Buzfuz and the abstracted Stubbin ; nor 
can we forget the unlucky novice, Mr. 
Phunky, who ruined the case for Mr. Pick- 



LECTURE VI 241 

wick by the way he cross-examined Mr. 
Winkle. 

No profession has risen more in dignity 
and respectability in England in recent years 
than that of the solicitor or attorney. In 
Scott and in almost all earlier novelists, the 
man who prepared the work for counsel and 
was engaged in the humbler practice of the 
courts is nearly always represented as a 
rogue. How often do we find him described 
as a "miserable pettifogger" and charged 
with " sharp practice." It is the same with 
Dickens. Even Mr. Perker in " Pickwick," 
who is thoroughly honest, cannot withhold his 
admiration of Dodson and Fogg's acuteness. 

'"Dodson and Fogg have taken Mrs. Bar- 
dell in execution for her costs, Sir,' said Job. 

'No,' exclaimed Perker, putting his hands 
in his pockets, and reclining against the side- 
board. 

'Yes,' said Job. 'It seems they got a 



242 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

cognovit out of her, for the amount of 'em, 
directly after the trial.' 

'By Jove!' said Perker, taking both 
hands out of his pockets, and striking the 
knuckles of his right against the palm of 
his left, emphatically, 'those are the clever- 
est scamps I ever had anything to do with.' 

'The sharpest practitioners / ever knew, 
Sir,' observed Lowten. 

'Sharp,' echoed Perker. 'There's no 
knowing where to have them.' 

'Very true, sir, there is not,' replied 
Lowten : and then both master and man 
pondered for a few seconds, with animated 
countenances, as if they were reflecting upon 
one of the most beautiful and ingenious 
discoveries the intellect of man had ever 
made, etc." 

In treating of the dishonest little legal 
practitioners Dickens indulges his taste for 
burlesque humour. Witness the scene in 



LECTURE VI 243 

which Dodson and Fogg are visited by Mr. 
Pickwick, and the two lawyers try to pro- 
voke him to commit an assault or to use 
slanderous language, and Sam Weller with- 
out ceremony drags his master out of the 
office. Mr. Sampson Brass is also a subject 
of rollicking humour, as is his sister, the fair 
Sally. Witness the scene where Brass visits 
Quilp at his wharf on the Thames and is com- 
pelled to drink spirits neat and almost boil- 
ing, and is made sick by the pipe the little 
monster makes him smoke ; or when Brass, 
aided by Quilp's wife and mother-in-law, 
is writing a description of the supposed corpse 
of his missing client, and recalls Quilp's 
characteristics, " his wit and humour, his 
pathos and his umberella." I confess I do 
not quite understand how Brass was able 
to get Kit imprisoned ; our author's law 
appears a little stagey. I should say that 
type of lawyer had disappeared ; but I once 
did come across a Dodson and Fogg, though 



244 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

a pianoforte, not a widow, was the cause of 
my costly experience. 

Let us now turn from the somewhat pain- 
ful abuses which Dickens denounces to a 
more cheerful subject, that of Parliamentary 
elections. 

Here I can speak frivolously, for I am one 
of those who have grave doubts whether a 
good or a bad system of election, in my 
country at any rate, matters much, for choose 
them how you will, the representatives of 
the people never seem to represent anything 
but their own private interests. Let us 
take Mr. Pickwick's experiences at Eatand- 
swill, which is, I believe, the now disfranchised 
borough of Sudbury in Suffolk, about four- 
teen miles from Bury St. Edmunds, whither 
Mr. Pickwick started on his expedition to 
thwart the plans of Mr. Jingle, and had his 
famous experience at the young ladies' school. 
His friend, Mr. Perker, was, you will recollect, 
the agent of the Hon. Samuel Slumkey. 



LECTURE VI 245 

"' Spirited contest, my dear Sir/ said Mr. 
Perker to Pickwick. 

*I am delighted to hear it,' said Mr. 
Pickwick, rubbing his hands. 

'I like to see sturdy patriotism, on what- 
ever side it is called forth ; — and so it's a 
spirited contest?' 

'O yes,' said the little man, 'very much 
so indeed. We have opened all the public 
houses in the place, and left our adversary 
nothing but the beer shops — masterly stroke 
of policy that, my dear Sir, eh ? ' ! 

The prospects however were doubtful, for 
Mr. Fizkin had thirty-three electors locked 
up in the coach house of the White Hart. 
All the hotels were full of voters and Mrs. 
Perker had brought green parasols for the 
wives of doubtful supporters of Mr. Slumkey. 
Then came the day of nomination and "Dur- 
ing the whole time of the polling, the town 
was in a perpetual fever of excitement. 
Everything was conducted on the most lib- 



246 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

eral and delightful scale. Exciseable articles 
were remarkably cheap at all the public 
houses. ... A small body of electors re- 
mained unpolled until the very last day. 
They were calculating and reflecting persons, 
who had not yet been convinced by the 
arguments of either party, although they 
had had frequent conferences with each. 
One hour before the close of the poll Mr. 
Perker solicited the honour of a private 
interview with these intelligent, these noble, 
these patriotic men. It was granted. His 
arguments were brief, but satisfactory. They 
went in a body to the poll ; and when they 
returned, the honourable Samuel Slumkey, 
of Slumkey Hall, was returned also." 

To persons accustomed to modern Parlia- 
mentary elections in England this passage 
would need a commentary to be under- 
stood. The nomination and the show of 
hands amid riotous disorder is a thing of 
the past. The protracted poll, lasting in 



LECTURE VI 247 

some cases for several days, the non-resident 
electors billeted in the inns at the candidates' 
expense, and the whole scene Dickens depicted 
belongs to another age which is almost 
incomprehensible to the England of to-day. 
Sam Weller's story of his father and the 
voters had more point in those days than 
now. Mr. Weller was offered a twenty-pound 
note (#100) and it was suggested that if the 
coach were overturned by the bank of a canal 
it might be a good thing. Strangely enough 
an accident happened. To quote Sam's 
words: "You wouldn't believe it, sir," con- 
tinued Sam, with a look of inexpressible 
impudence at his master, "that on the wery 
day he came down with those voters, his 
coach was upset on that 'ere wery spot, 
and every man of them was turned into the 
canal." In the unreformed Parliament, be- 
fore 1832, the boroughs had each its own 
peculiar electorate ; and I am glad to use 
for my information a book written by two 



248 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

learned scholars now in America, Mr. and 
Mrs. Porritt. In not a few places the election 
of members was vested in the Mayor and 
burgesses, in others the different guilds and 
corporations were the electors. In one case 
the franchise was more democratic even 
than now, the very tramps who slept in 
the town of Preston became voters. Not 
infrequently the members were nominated 
by a local magnate. In many cases the town 
sold its nomination to the highest bidder ; 
and this was occasionally the case at Eatand- 
swill, if so be that it represents Sudbury. 
But frequently the electors were the so- 
called "freemen" of the borough. The name 
takes us back to mediaeval times, when 
slavery was in existence, or to the days when 
the guilds were close corporations, and no 
one not free of them could practise any 
trade. But in later times the freedom was 
a matter of inheritance and could even be 
taken up, in some cases, by marriage with a 



LECTURE VI 249 

" freeman's " daughter. The franchise in 
many towns was enjoyed only by these free- 
men, and in Ipswich, to take an example 
familiar to me, most of them were non- 
resident. 

In an election in the " twenties," which is 
reputed to have cost the candidates £30,000 
(#150,000), I have been told that they char- 
tered ships to bring electors from Holland. 
This is, doubtless, why all the hotels in 
Eatandswill were crowded, and explains the 
elder Mr. Weller's adventure by the canal. 
Bribery was illegal ; and in a famous case in 
1819 Sir Manasseh Massey Lopez was fined 
£10,000 (#50,000) and imprisoned for two 
years for practising it at Grampound. But 
it was an exceptional case ; and the Lords 
threw out the bill for disfranchising the 
borough. 

Now we are on the subject of political 
life I cannot resist reminding you of a per- 
fectly delightful sketch of a political fraud 



250 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

in the person of Mr. Gregsbury in " Nicholas 
Nickleby." He comes into the story for 
no particular reason except to give Dickens 
the joy of describing the sort of man he 
had doubtless observed when he was a press- 
man in the House of Commons. 

Nicholas is present when the deputation 
arrives to request Mr. Gregsbury to resign 
his seat, and Mr. Pugstyles is its spokesman. 

"'My conduct, Pugstyles/ said Mr. Gregs- 
bury, looking round upon the deputation 
with gracious magnanimity, 'my conduct 
has been, and ever will be, regulated by a 
sincere regard for this great and happy 
country. Whether I look at home, or abroad ; 
whether I behold the peaceful industrious 
communities of our island home : her rivers 
covered with steamboats, her road with 
locomotives, her streets with cabs, her skies 
with balloons of a power and magnitude 
hitherto unknown in the history of aero- 
nautics — I say whether I look at home, etc., 



LECTURE VI 251 

etc., I clasp my hands, and, turning my 
eyes to the broad expanse above my head, 
exclaim, Thank God I am a Briton.'" When 
even this outburst does not meet with ap- 
proval and the deputation presses Mr. Gregs- 
bury to resign, the member reads a letter he 
has addressed to Mr. Pugstyles in which 
he says, "Actuated by no personal motives, 
but moved only by high and great constitu- 
tional considerations ... I would rather keep 
my seat, and intend doing so." No, in all 
the changes time has brought, one thing does 
not change — our politicians are still the 
same. 

In " Our Mutual Friend " our author touches 
once more on the state of the poor and their 
terror of "the parish." No one who has 
read this novel, with its wealth of characters 
amazing even for Dickens — for even in 
his other works you fail to find so many 
types as Bella Wilfer, Mr. and Mrs. Boffin, 
Fascination Fledgby, the dolls' dressmaker, 



252 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

Mr. Silas Wegg, Mr. Venus, Rogue Rider- 
hood, the Veneerings, to mention only a 
few — no one, I say, can ever forget the old 
washerwoman Betty Higden and her horror 
of the workhouse, how it haunted her whole 
life and gave an additional terror to death, 
that thereby she would fall into the hands 
of the parish and be buried by it. And in 
this novel Dickens is as severe on the injudi- 
cious charity of philanthropists and faddists 
as he is upon the callousness of the guardians 
of the poor. There is no more terrible satire 
on the mistakes of the education of that age 
than his delineation of Bradley Headstone. 
I have never to my recollection read any 
discussion of this character but I have often 
thought that in Headstone and Charley 
Hexam, his pupil, he is giving a warning 
of the dangers of modern education. 

Universal education was not yet adopted 
in England, which was the most backward 
of countries in this respect. But it was in 



LECTURE VI 253 

the air, and Dickens foresaw that some of 
the principles adopted would prove serious 
to the community. He dwells on the me- 
chanical efficiency of the teaching ; the learn- 
ing to write essays on any subject exactly 
one slate long, for example ; on the mis- 
cellaneous and useless information imparted ; 
on a Bible teaching which has nothing to do 
with vital religion. Dickens recognised that 
the education of all classes was killing indi- 
viduality, and not fostering moral or spiritual 
qualities. He recognised that in the type 
of Charley Hexam it was encouraging a desire 
for "respectability," consisting, not in taking 
one's coat off to work, but in working in a 
black coat, which was killing the finer feel- 
ings in which the poor often shew to the 
advantage of the rich. And in Bradley 
Headstone Dickens points out, that all this 
smug education was powerless to restrain 
the elemental ferocity of human nature in 
the schoolmaster, who looked natural in 



254 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

Rogue RiderhoocTs clothes, and not him- 
self in his decent black coat. There was 
latent in him all the ferocity of a hardened 
criminal ; and recent events are shewing 
how powerless education is really to civilise 
the heart of man. 

I have spoken of the need of a map of 
London to understand Dickens, and I shall 
now take an extract from "Oliver Twist" 
to illustrate this remark. Oliver has just met 
with John Dawkins, otherwise the Artful 
Dodger, who offered to take him to a lodging. 
"It was nearly eleven o'clock when they 
reached the turnpike at Islington. They 
crossed from the Angel into St. John's Road ; 
struck down the small street which terminates 
at Sadlers Wells Theatre ; through Exmouth 
Street and Coppice Row ; down the little 
court by the side of the workhouse ; across 
the classic ground which once bore the name 
of Hockley in the Hole, thence to little Saf- 
fron Hill the Great and so on to when they 



LECTURE VI 255 

reached the bottom of the hill, his (Oliver's) 
conductor, catching him by the arm, pushed 
open the door of a house near Field Lane." 

Now I almost defy anyone to find all these 
localities in a modern map. You would 
have, in the first place, to start in the middle 
of London at the Angel at Islington. Sadlers 
Wells is now in the midst of a network of 
streets. It was only when I turned to North- 
cock's history of London, which has a good 
map dated 1772, that all was plain. Islington 
was a village outside London ; Sadlers Wells 
a suburban resort ; Exmouth street was 
not yet built ; * but Coppice row, Hockley 
in the Hole, and of course Saffron Hill and 
Field Lane, were all easily found. 

In speaking of this great delineator of 
human character as now needing explana- 
tion and comment, I have no doubt that he 
belongs to that small group of writers whose 



1 It must have been named after Admiral Pellew (Lord Exmouth), 
who captured Algiers in 1816. 



256 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

works belong to all ages. We hear complaints 
in England that young people do not read him ; 
and the same were made when we were young. 

But with us, and I believe with you, his 
popularity from time to time revives, and 
no educated man or woman can ignore him. 
The fact that he has appealed so strongly to 
the imagination of America is alone a proof 
of the universality of his genius ; for, like 
Shakespeare and the classics of all countries, 
his works are the property, not of one people, 
but of the world. He is not perfect ; we 
should not love him so much if he were. 
He has faults of style, of arrangement, even 
of taste. It is easy to criticise ; but because 
of his very excellences, his humour, his pathos, 
his wide sympathy, his hatred of injustice 
and oppression, it seems almost presumption 
to endeavour to sing his praises. 

May I conclude with those prophetic words 
he puts into the mouth of Martin Chuzzlewit 
on leaving your country, which he made his 



LECTURE VI 257 

own by denouncing its failings as unspar- 
ingly as he did those of his own mother land, 
in the hope that both you and we, America 
and England, would conquer them and be- 
come the common benefactors of humanity. 

"'I am thinking,' said Mark, 'that if 
I was a painter and was called upon to paint 
the American Eagle, how should I do it ?' 

'Paint it as like an Eagle as you could, I 
suppose/ 

'No,' said Mark, 'that wouldn't do for 
me, sir. I should want to draw it like a 
Bat for its shortsightedness, like a Bantam 
for its bragging, like a Magpie for its honesty, 
like a Peacock for its vanity, like an Ostrich 
for putting its head in the mud and thinking 
nobody sees it.' 

'And like a Phoenix for its power of spring- 
ing from the ashes of its faults and vices 
and soaring up into the sky.' 

'Well, Mark, let us hope so.'" 



258 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 
APPENDIX TO LECTURE VI 

To shew Dickens' care in collecting his facts the fol- 
lowing report of a case relating to Yorkshire Schools is 
of interest. It was supplied to the author by C. S. 
Kenny, Esq., Downing Professor of the Laws of Eng- 
land, Cambridge. 

Chapter II. The Relevancy of Evidence 

[Evidence must be confined to the points in issue.] 
BOLDRON v. WIDDOWS 

Westminster N. P. Sittings. 1824. 

1 Carrington and Payne 65. 

This was an action for defamation. The declaration 
stated that the plaintiff kept a school, and had divers 
scholars; and that the defendant spoke of him in his 
business of a schoolmaster certain words there set out. 
The words were variously laid in different counts; 
but they were, in substance, that the scholars were ill 
fed, and badly lodged, had had the itch, and were full 
of vermin. Some of the counts laid the loss of cer- 
tain scholars as special damage. Pleas — the general 
issue; and justifications, that the whole of the words 
were true. 

For the plaintiff, several witnesses proved the speak- 
ing of the words, and that the boys were boarded, 
educated, and clothed, by the plaintiff, at £20 a year 
each, near Richmond in Yorkshire : and the usher of 
the school was called to prove that the boys were well 



LECTURE VI 259 

fed and well lodged, and had no itch. In his cross- 
examination it appeared that there were between eighty 
and ninety boys ; that about seventy of them had had a 
cutaneous disease; and that they all slept in three 
rooms close to the roof, with no ceiling ; and that there 
was a general combing of the heads of the whole school 
every morning over a pewter dish, and that the vermin 
combed out were thrown into the yard; no boy was 
free from them. A piece of bread of a perfectly black 
hue was shewn him : he did not think the bread in the 
school so black as that. 

The witness having stated that he had himself been 
at the Appleby grammar-school, the plaintiff's counsel 
wished to ask him what was the quality of the provi- 
sions used by the plaintiff's school, compared with 
those consumed by the Appleby grammar-school. 

The defendant's counsel objected to this. 

Abbott, C.J. That cannot be asked ; what is done 
at any particular school is not evidence. You may shew 
the general treatment of boys at schools, and shew that 
the plaintiff treated the boys here as well as they could 
be treated for £20 a year each, for board, education, 
and clothes. 

One of the plaintiff's scholars was then called to prove 
the plaintiff's good treatment of them. 

In cross-examination, the defendant's counsel wished 
to ask him whether the plaintiff did not set the boys to 
plant potatoes in school hours ? 

Abbott, C.J. I do not think you can ask this ; the 
issue here being whether the plaintiff's scholars were ill 



260 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

fed, badly lodged, had the itch, and had vermin. Noth- 
ing has been said as to their being badly educated. 
Their education is not in question here. 

Gurney, for the defendant, addressed the jury, and 
called witnesses to prove the truth of the words. 

Verdict for the plaintiff, damages £120. 



LECTURE VII 

MlD-VlCTORIANISM. W. M. THACKERAY 

The word respectable has a strange his- 
tory. In the days of the later Roman Empire 
its equivalent "spectabilis" was applied to 
the highest dignitaries. In France it is a 
title of honour — "votre respectable mere" 
means something very different from "your 
respectable mother." In England respect- 
ability is associated with primness, faded 
clothes, and possibly necessary penurious- 
ness. One would not seek a way to a lady's 
good graces by describing her as a respect- 
able woman. When we say a man's abilities 
are "respectable," it is in order to get some- 
one else to give him employment. It is a 
word which conveys ridicule ever since the 

famous dialogue in Thurtell's trial for murder : 

261 



262 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

Witness. The prisoner was a respectable 
man. 

Counsel. What do you mean by respect- 
able ? 

Witness. Well — er — he kept a gig. 

The characteristic of Mid-Victorian so- 
ciety was respectability, and I shall try to 
show that its chief exponent W. M. Thack- 
eray was its prophet. 

The English race has always had a bias in 
favour of what is known as Puritanism, not 
only in religion but in life. I think it may 
be said of us that we dislike intensely to have 
a thing forbidden by law, but love to have 
many forbidden by custom. We abhor a 
number of notices put up to say we must do 
this or that, that most things are forbidden, 
we detest a police who interfere with the 
ordinary affairs of life and force us under 
penalty to submit to trivial regulations. But 
we have no objections to the erection of a 
number of conventions far more irksome 



LECTURE VII 263 

than any legal code of morals and we submit 
to a police system created by ourselves, more 
vigilant, more inquisitive, more given to 
informing than any secret service in the 
world. For what laws were ever devised 
more drastic in their operation than those 
of public opinion, and has any vehmgericht 
or inquisition ever judged unseen and con- 
demned unheard on the report of the police, 
in a more secret and summary fashion than 
that of the tea table of Mrs. Grundy ? Never 
was society more under the thrall of these 
dominating influences than in the Early 
and Mid-Victorian age. 

The reason for this seems plain enough. 
The eighteenth century had been distin- 
guished for the coarseness of its language, 
manners, and morals. The upper classes 
combined a good deal of old world politeness 
with a surprisingly frank disregard of moral 
considerations. There were conspicuous ex- 
ceptions, but the singular impunity enjoyed 



264 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

by men of high rank and position made 
them often callous as to the opinion of their 
inferiors. The lower classes were accustomed 
to brutal sports and cruel amusements and 
unrestrained by any effective police, besides 
being entirely uneducated. The middle class, 
which was daily becoming more and more 
important to the life of the nation owing 
to the rapid development of trade and manu- 
facture, was gradually monopolising the polit- 
ical control of the nation. It was in this 
class that the evangelical and Methodist 
movements had achieved their chief successes ; 
and those who composed it were fundamen- 
tally serious minded. Under the Regency 
and during the reign of George IV and William 
IV the court was essentially aristocratic, 
and neither monarch gave it any prestige 
on the side of morality. Queen Victoria 
took a middle-class view of life ; domesticity 
was the key-note of her reign. The Prince 
Consort was the model husband and father, 



LECTURE VII 265 

so correct, so admirable, so exemplary, that 
even now we are apt to forget how able and 
wise a man he was and how heavy a debt 
his adopted country owes him. 

One of the effects of the Victorian age was 
that England awoke to a most amazing sense 
of its own virtue. People were continually 
contrasting the present with the past, to the 
disadvantage of the latter. In the * forties/ 
and even ' fifties,' many people could remember 
the time when it was unsafe to approach 
London after dusk on account of the high- 
waymen, when men, women, and children 
were hung by the score for the merest trifles, 
when duels were of almost daily occurrence, 
when the grossest abuses existed in church 
and state, when immorality in the highest 
quarters flaunted itself unashamed before 
the world. Old men could recall a time when 
to get drunk and use the foulest possible 
language was almost necessary, if a man 
were not to be written down as a milksop. 



266 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

And the contrast was almost too delightful 
to the newly emancipated middle class in 
their neat villas with trim gardens, whence 
they went to church decorously, sat in their 
select pew, their large families around them, 
and thanked God that they were not as other 
people's wicked ancestors had been. 

In one of Lever's novels — I believe — 
an Irish solicitor was asked by an English- 
man the reason for the success of a famous 
Counsellor with juries and replied, "He first 
butthers them up ; and then slithers them 
down." I am going to take the same liberty 
with that great novelist W. M. Thackeray, 
only I protest that my butter is genuine and 
were I an Irishman myself I should say it 
came from the heart. I cheerfully bow 
before the genius of England's master of 
fiction. His characters are my friends, his 
kindly wisdom my delight, his pathos can 
move me almost to tears, his cynicism is 
a constant stimulant. His style is to me 



LECTURE VII 267 

incomparable and fills me with envy and 
despair. His books are my best companions 
in sickness and in health, in depression and 
in my most cheerful moments. If I am 
his critic, it is because he is so old a friend 
that I love him alike for his weaknesses and 
peculiarities and for his great merits. With 
the utmost humility I commend his scholar- 
ship and appreciation of the literature of 
the eighteenth century. His " Four Georges " 
and " English Humorists " are to me models 
of what literary lectures should be. I could 
praise him till I wearied my audience, and 
all my praise would be absolutely genuine. 

No student of Thackeray can fail to admire 
the way in which he prepared himself by 
study for his historical novels. In " Esmond " 
and the "Virginians" he saturated himself 
in the literature of his period. He could 
catch the style of the pamphleteer, the 
newspaper writer ; he reproduces the conver- 
sation of the wits so as occasionally to deceive 



268 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

the very elect. The descriptions of life at 
Castlewood, of the service in Winchester 
Cathedral, the letters of the old Marchioness 
of Esmond, Henry Esmond's contribution 
to the Spectator, the account of the battle 
of Wynandael, etc., are all masterpieces. So 
are some of the minor characters in these 
novels — Will Esmond in the "Virginians," for 
example, Father Holt, Esmond's Jesuit tutor 
and, above all, Parson Sampson in the "Vir- 
ginians." But his principal actors are not, 
I think, of the eighteenth century at all. 
They are the people Thackeray himself knew, 
in the garb of their supposed period, but 
really men and women of the middle of the 
nineteenth century. Esmond and George 
Warrington, Rachel, Lady Castlewood, and 
her incomparable daughter Beatrix are, with 
all their perfect accessories, modern men 
and women playing a part, admirably it is 
true, but still a part, in the comedy of a by- 
gone age. In the days of Anne and the 



LECTURE VII 269 

Georges I am confident no one felt or acted 
or thought as they are represented by our 
author. It is only when Thackeray is out of 
sympathy with his heroes that he makes them 
true to their age. In " Barry Lyndon " we 
have the genuine article, so we do in his uncle, 
the Chevalier de Balibari, so again in every 
character in "Catherine," which was intended 
as a burlesque. But in the more serious 
novels I feel somehow that Thackeray did 
not really transport his characters into a 
bygone age. 

Of this he seems to have been conscious 
himself. When he drew pictures to illustrate 
" Vanity Fair," he did not depict Rawdon 
Crawley as a Waterloo guardsman, nor Becky 
as a lady of fashion in 18 16, nor Pitt as 
an aristocratic member of the Clapham set. 
He drew them as the people he knew himself 
and dressed them in the costume of his own 
time, thus acknowledging how he really 
regarded his own creations. 



270 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

The ruling aristocracy came to an end 
when the Reform Bill was passed in 1832, 
but their prestige remained. The middle 
class entered the Promised Land and took 
their share in its government : but not tri- 
umphantly. I may almost say they were 
abashed by their success. The peers could 
no more return a great proportion of the 
House of Commons, they could no more 
promote or cast down common men much 
as they pleased. They dare no longer defy 
public opinion as their predecessors had 
done. Yet to the middle class they still 
appeared august enough. Their manners, 
their breeding, the state in which many 
lived, inspired no little awe among those 
immediately below them. Society was di- 
vided into castes almost as rigidly, though 
less formally, than in India to-day. The 
old Whig nobility still considered themselves 
divinely called to rule the country and to 
dictate to the sovereign. The county fami- 



LECTURE VII 271 

lies held aloof from the inhabitants of the 
town ; and barely tolerated the professional 
classes. The beneficed clergy, barristers, 
medical men, lesser army officers, etc., scorned 
the traders. The wholesale trader held the 
retail storekeeper in scorn and so on ad 
infinitum. But in England the barriers of 
rank were never insurmountable, and in a 
free country anyone was at liberty to try to 
climb them. Hence everybody endeavored 
with varying success to ascend the social 
ladder, and did not scruple to use other 
people as stepping stones. Thus arose the 
fierce fight to get into what is still called 
"Society" and the rampant snobbery which 
Thackeray was never tired of denouncing. 
With this we may begin the investigation 
of his attitude towards the society of his 
age. 

The great example of this pushfulness is 
Thackeray's most delightful creation in 
"Vanity Fair," Becky Sharp, though she as- 



272 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

suredly was no snob. With all her doubtful 
antecedents, however, Becky, at least, married 
into the ranks of the aristocracy ; and in 
her husband our author has created so real 
a person that one is actually disposed to 
question whether he was rightly judged by 
the author of his being. We are told that 
Rawdon Crawley was stupid, badly educated, 
unaccustomed to good society, at least when 
ladies were present. But if he were such 
an oaf why did his rich aunt Miss Crawley, 
who had known Sheridan and the wits, make 
such a fuss about him and make him sit 
at table with herself and Becky because "we 
are the only Christians in the county." 
Why was he allowed to act in the Charades 
at Gaunt House on that memorable night 
of his wife's triumph ? The fact is that 
Thackeray was obsessed with the idea that 
all young men of fashion were necessarily 
stupid. It is a thoroughly middle-class 
tradition and we find it constantly in his 



LECTURE VII 273 

pages. Because of certain mannerisms and 
affectations, because they cared little for 
literature, because they fought duels and 
gambled, all young men about town were 
not necessarily fools ; and it was a mistake 
to depict Rawdon Crawley as on the one 
hand uncommonly sharp and also a fool. 
But it is because Thackeray's genius has 
created such a living being that we are in- 
dignant at his failure to make him conform 
to our ideas of what we think he really was. 
We regard him as a living man whom his 
creator has misjudged, and not as the figment 
of the brain of the author. 

"Vanity Fair," however, holds up the 
mirror to social England in the unrivalled 
description of Becky's climb up the rungs 
of the ladder till she arrived at the very 
apex of fashionable success. Her husband's 
position gave her every opportunity with 
the men, and with them it was easy enough. 
Where her genius was seen was in her dealings 



274 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

with her own sex. Apart from the skill 
displayed in the description of her career, 
she is interesting to us as an example of the 
gradual invasion of society by those who were 
born outside its pale. Men, as we have seen, 
like Creevey, occasionally managed to make 
themselves indispensable, but for a woman 
to do so was a most difficult task. At first 
Becky was a complete failure so far as her 
own sex was concerned. Miss Crawley was 
never taken in for a moment. She recog- 
nised her attractions and allowed her to 
amuse her, but had no idea of regarding Becky 
as anything more than a sort of upper serv- 
ant. "She's just a companion as you are, 
Briggs, only infinitely more amusing." When 
she married Rawdon, she did for herself so 
far as the old lady's good graces were con- 
cerned. In her early married life she was 
equally unsuccessful. At Paris, where her 
husband was in the army of occupation, her 
success with the men and her popularity 



LECTURE VII 275 

with the great ladies of French society, owing 
to her mastery of the language, only increased 
the bitterness of her countrywomen against 
her. When she came back to London, men 
crowded her little house in Curzon Street, 
but the ladies held sternly aloof. Social 
distinctions were very marked in the early 
"twenties" in London, and the great ladies 
of the day had no idea of allowing people of 
doubtful birth to push themselves into their 
company. You doubtless recollect how Jane 
Austen describes the dinner party at Lady 
Caroline de Burgh's in "Pride and Prejudice" 
to which Elizabeth and Mr. and Mrs. Collins 
were invited, and the studied rudeness with 
which her ladyship treated her guests in 
order to keep them conscious of their inferi- 
ority. We find the same sort of thing in 
Lord Lytton's early novel "Pelham," where 
the man of fashion treats the people he meets 
in the country as beings of a different species. 
Every description of fashionable life tells 



276 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

the same story and we have to realise this to 
understand "Vanity Fair." 

I must ask you to pardon me if I linger 
over this theme and try to elaborate it. 
Becky had had a good deal of experience 
before her chance came, and she was fit to 
take it. Her brother-in-law, Pitt Crawley, 
was always a little smitten by her charm 
and determined to do the right thing by 
Rawdon by inviting him and Becky to 
Queen's Crawley. Becky strikes the right 
note at once — they go by coach, " it looks 
more humble." Once there, she captivates 
Lady Jane by affecting interest in her nurs- 
ery. But these are only the outworks, Lady 
Jane is kind and soft, Pitt is pompous 
and easily flattered. But the citadel re- 
mained unvanquished in the person of 
Lady Southdown, Pitt's mother-in-law. Here 
we have Thackeray's counterpart of Lady 
Caroline de Burgh, a countess of austere 
evangelical piety, combined with a firm 



LECTURE VII 277 

but by no means constant belief in patent 
medicines and more or less irregular clergy 
and medical practitioners, who forces her 
doctrines and her doctorings without mercy 
upon her dependants and inferiors. "She 
would order Gaffer Hodge to be converted, 
as she would order Goody Hicks to take 
a James' powder, without appeal, resistance 
or benefit of clergy." Our author describes 
her as "this awful missionary of the Truth," 
driving about her estate administering tracts 
and medicaments. 

A lady so domineering, so aristocratic, 
so virtuous could not be expected to receive 
poor Becky with her doubtful antecedents 
and still more questionable conduct. She 
vows she will leave Queen's Crawley if ever 
Mrs. Rawdon sets foot in the home. But 
Pitt Crawley knows womankind: "She has 
spent her last dividends, and has nowhere 
to go. A countess living in an inn is a 
ruined woman." This shrewd diagnosis is 



278 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

correct : her ladyship remains and mani- 
fests her disapproval of Becky by a stony 
silence. That astute little woman, however, 
is not daunted. She reads the countess's 
tracts ; she is troubled about her soul. Her 
ladyship cannot resist the temptation of 
snatching such a brand from the burning. 
She hopes to convert Becky, who is prepared 
for a greater sacrifice. She offers her body as 
well as her soul, and consults Lady Southdown 
about her health. The victory is won. That 
night the fearsome form of the great lady ap- 
pears in night attire at Becky's bedside and 
forces her to drink the decoction she has pre- 
pared. Her victim swallows it and makes so 
good a story of the incident that her male 
friends are convulsed, and thus, "for the first 
time in her life, Lady Southdown was made 
amusing." It is when Mrs. Rawdon Crawley 
forces her way into the company of the real 
leaders of London society that we get a 
true glimpse of the social life of the period, 



LECTURE VII 279 

and I shall ask your permission to read the 
well-known but I think rarely quoted account 
of her debut at the dinner party at Gaunt 
House. To me, I confess, it seems inimitable. 
I must, however, remind you of the scenes 
which lead up to it. First, there is Lord 
Steyne's request or rather order to the ladies 
of his household to call on Becky, which they 
do, and when his lordship pays her a visit 
he is amused to find her gloating over the 
cards they have left. "All women," he says, 
"are alike. Everybody is striving for what 
is not worth having. . . . You will go to 
Gaunt House. It's not half so nice as here. 
My wife is as gay as Lady Macbeth and my 
daughters as cheerful as Regan and Goneril. 
. . . And gare aux femmes; look out and 
hold your own ! How the women will bully 
you !" Then there is the interview of Lord 
Steyne with his wife and daughters. Lady 
Steyne is told to write and ask Becky to 
dinner. Lady Gaunt, the eldest son's wife, 



280 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

says she will not be present. Lady George, 
the second son's wife, reminds him of the 
money she brought into the family — all 
in vain. Steyne treats them to a vigorous 
allocution. "You will be pleased to receive 
her with the utmost cordiality, as you will 
receive all persons whom I present to this 
house. . . . Who is master of it, and what 
is it ? This temple of virtue belongs to me. 
And if I invite all Newgate and all Bedlam 
here, by — they shall be welcomed." The 
ladies of course yield but they make it hot 
for their presumptuous little guest. 

"It was when the ladies were alone that 
Becky knew that the tug of war would come. 
And then indeed the little woman found 
herself in such a situation as made her 
acknowledge the correctness of Lord Steyne's 
caution to her to beware of the society of 
ladies above her own sphere. As they say 
that persons who hate Irishmen most are 
Irishmen : so, assuredly the greatest tyrants 



LECTURE VII 281 

over women are women. When poor little 
Becky, alone with the ladies, went up to 
the fireplace whither the great ladies had 
repaired, the great ladies marched away 
and took possession of a table of drawings. 
When Becky followed them to the table of 
drawings, they dropped off one by one to 
the fire again. She tried to speak to the 
children (of whom she was commonly fond 
in public places), but master George Gaunt 
was called away by his mamma ; and the 
stranger was treated with such cruelty finally, 
that even Lady Steyne pitied her, and went 
up to speak to the friendless little woman." 

Later on she had her triumph, for when the 
gentlemen came in they crowded round the 
piano. "And Mr. Paul Jefferson Jones (an 
American guest) thought he had made a 
conquest of Lady Gaunt by going up to her 
ladyship, and praising her delightful friend's 
first-rate singing/' Once Becky had been 
recognised at Gaunt House, other ladies began 



282 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

to acknowledge her, none the less eagerly 
because she was known not to be too favour- 
ably regarded by the Steyne females. The 
great Lady Fitz Willis paid her marked 
attention. When anyone was taken up by 
this lady, her position was safe. Not that 
she was amusing or clever or beautiful, " being 
a faded person of fifty seven": but never- 
theless she was a recognised leader whose 
social verdict was undisputed. Under her 
aegis Becky was safe ; and it was thrown 
over our little adventuress because of an 
early rivalry between Lady Fitz Willis and 
Lady Steyne. Now the success of Becky 
with all her disadvantages was not unde- 
served. She had wit, tact, courage. She 
could flatter where necessary : but she could 
defy an enemy when she thought fit. Very 
great ladies feared her biting sarcasm if 
they provoked it ; and she won her place 
because of her weapons of defiance as well 
as her powers of attraction. She fell from 



LECTURE VII 283 

her high position because she was found out ; 
but, even after her exposure and Rawdon's 
eye-opening to her unfaithfulness to his 
cause, she fought on in the social battle ; 
and the last glimpse of her is at a charity 
bazaar ! 

But the sq.cie.ty which Becky Sharp con- 
quered by her brains was soon to be stormed 
by wealth. And Thackeray describes the 
process in the novels of a later period. The 
strife was only beginning in " Vanity Fair." 
Lord Steyne's younger son, we are told, 
married the daughter of the great banker 
Lord Helvellyn ; but this was exceptional. 
The city was just beginning to intermarry 
with the lesser nobility. Miss Schwartz, the 
rich West Indian, who was destined for young 
George Osborne, was married into the noble 
family of McMull. The younger Miss 
Osborne married, after much haggling over 
settlements, Frederick Bullock of Hulker Bul- 
lock and Co., whose family was allied with the 



284 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

impecunious nobility ; but she was completely 
out of society. She would have gone on her 
knees to Gaunt House to be asked to dinner 
there. Her father, whose means would have 
procured him an entrance into any society 
a few years later, then lived in an unfashion- 
able part of London, and his dinner parties 
were dull, pompous gatherings, the most 
honoured guest being Sir Thomas Coffin, 
"the hanging judge" for whose benefit the 
famous tawny port was always produced. 

It was about a decade after the Reform 
Bill of 1832 that the walls of the Jericho of 
Good Society began to shake at the trumpet 
sound of wealth. Before we enter upon the 
subject let me remind you of two marks of 
the great novelist's skill, (1) the names he 
gives his characters and (2) his careful trac- 
ing of their pedigrees. The Earl of Dorking 
lives at Chanteclere, his eldest son is Vis- 
count Rooster, his daughters are the Ladies 
Adelaide and Hennie Pulleine. Who cannot 



LECTURE VII 285 

with a very little knowledge of London con- 
jure up Gaunt House and Great Gaunt 
Square ? The character of the Marquis of 
Steyne is shown in his numerous titles. He is 
Viscount Hellborough and Baron Pitchley 
and Grillsbury, etc., etc. The Crawley family 
name their sons after the most popular man 
of the day. So Sir Walpole Crawley was 
evidently born about 1730, Sir Pitt between 
1757 and 1761, the Reverend Bute about 
1761, Sir Pitt, the second, after the time 
younger Pitt rose to power — that is, later 
than 1784, and Rawdon when Lord Rawdon 
was the favourite of the Prince of Wales. 

The pedigrees, especially of the rising fami- 
lies, are traced very carefully. Do you remem- 
ber Mr. Foker, the charming young man of 
fashion in " Pendennis " ? His unfailing good 
humour, his shrewdness, his gaudy garments, 
his advice to Pendennis, when he was in- 
fatuated with Miss Fotheringay, and when 
he was going the pace at Oxbridge ; his 



286 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

love for Miss Amory and his recovery when 
he found out how heartless she was ? Though 
he plays a minor part, his character is as 
subtle a delineation as any by this master 
hand. Now notice how we get this blend 
of aristocracy and commercialism ; for Foker 
is a true gentleman, honourable, chivalrous, 
with healthy instincts, yet with a good deal 
of the man of business in him, for all his idle- 
ness and eccentricity a man not easily duped. 
In the "Virginians" George Warrington, 
when lately married and very poor, gets to 
know a Mr. Voelker, a rich, vulgar but kindly 
brewer, our hero's grandfather. His father 
has Anglicised himself and become Mr. Foker 
whose porter is of world-wide celebrity. He 
marries an Earl's daughter and yet insists 
on the family beverage being served at every 
meal, and Major Pendennis feels bound 
to taste it when he dines though the old 
gentleman found it disagreed with him. In 
Harry Foker, the young man of pleasure, we 



LECTURE VII 287 

have the half-and-half beer and the peerage, 
and no bad blend either. In Barnes Newcome 
we have a less attractive type of the same 
class. The Newcomes are as humble in 
origin but more pretentious than the Fokers. 
They do not parade the family business, 
being bankers ; but have discovered a noble 
ancestry. Their family can be traced back 
to the "Barber Surgeon of Edward the 
Confessor. ,, Thomas Newcome, the second 
founder, had however to begin as a very 
intelligent factory hand who left his native 
Newcome, made a moderate fortune, gal- 
lantly returned and married a girl of his own 
class, and became the father of that prince 
of gentlemen, Colonel Newcome, whose son 
Clive, Thackeray wishes us to admire, though 
I confess I find him insufferable. Then 
his first wife dies and Thomas flies at higher 
game. He woos and wins the great heiress, 
pietist, and philanthropist, Sophia Alethea 
Hobson, to the amazement of the serious 



288 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

Clapham circle in which she moves. Their 
twin sons are Sir Brian, who marries Lady 
Ann Barnes, daughter of the Earl of Kew, 
whose eldest son is Lord Walham — all neigh- 
bouring suburbs of London give the name 
to this aristocratic family, — and Hobson, 
a thorough man of business, who marries a 
lawyer's daughter, and affects the farmer, 
whilst his wife professes to admire talent. 
Hobson is shrewd, Brian pompous, and as the 
former says of himself, you must get up very 
early in the morning to take him in. If in 
Foker we have the attractive side, in Sir Brian 
Newcome's eldest son Barnes we have the 
other aspect of the blending of birth and 
business. Had Harry Foker sprung from 
two noble grandfathers, he might have been 
just as simple-hearted and good-natured as 
he now appears, like Lord Southdown in 
" Vanity Fair," or Ethel Newcome's lover, 
Lord Kew ; but he would not have been 
quite so shrewd — for it is no impeachment 



LECTURE VII 289 

of a man's natural good sense that he should 
have been taken in by the purely imaginary 
virtues of a Blanche Amory. But in Barnes 
Newcome we see the mixture of the hardness 
of a well-bred man of the world and the 
business ability inherited from a commercial 
ancestry. I cannot resist quoting at some 
length the introduction of Barnes to his 
uncle Col. Newcome at Mrs. Hobson New- 
come's evening party. The description of 
it is sketched for the Colonel's benefit, by 
Frank Honeyman, the popular preacher. 

"The Jew with a beard, as you call him, 
is Herr Von Lungen the eminent haut-boy 
player ... At the piano, accompanied by 
Mademoiselle Lebrun, is Signor Mezzocaldo 
the great barytone from Rome. Professor 
Quartz and Baron Hammerstein, celebrated 
geologists from Germany, are talking with 
their illustrious confrere Sir Robert Craxton, 
in the door. Do you see that stout gentle- 
man with snuff on his shirt ? The eloquent 



290 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

Dr. McGuffog of Edinburgh talking to Dr. 
Ettore, who lately escaped the Inquisition 
at Rome in the disguise of a washerwoman, 
after undergoing the question several times, 
the rack and the thumbscrew. . . . That 
splendid man in the red fez is Kurbash Pasha 

— another renegade, I deeply lament to say, 

— a hair-dresser from Marseilles, by name 
Monsieur Ferchaud — " 

But I need not trouble you by reading 
more. Mrs. Hobson Newcome could not 
get the aristocracy, so she collected nota- 
bilities and felt herself intellectual. As you 
will remember, the guest of the evening was 
"Rummum Loll, otherwise his Excellency, 
otherwise his Highness, . . . the chief pro- 
prietor of the diamond mines of Golconda, 
with a claim of three millions and a half 
upon the East India Company." The Rum- 
mum was the lion of the year and went every- 
where, and the whole company was amazed 
when with the air of the deepest humility 



LECTURE VII 291 

he saluted Colonel Newcome, who in his old- 
fashioned coat and diamond pin was being 
mistaken for a Moldavian boyar. At this 
juncture Barnes comes in and makes himself 
known to his uncle. The art with which 
the scene is drawn is consummate. Barnes 
behaves as a thoroughly well bred man, 
greets the Colonel with unaffectedly good 
manners, snubs his aunt by a few quiet 
words, and finally turns to his uncle to dis- 
cuss the Rummum. "I know he ain't a 
prince any more than I am." Then Barnes 
warms to the subject and frankly asks the 
Colonel to tell him if the bank can trust the 
Indian magnate. "The young man of business 
had dropped his drawl or his languor, and 
was speaking quite goodnaturedly and self- 
ishly. Had you talked for a week, you 
could not have made him understand the 
scorn and loathing with which the Colonel 
regarded him." 

Barnes is of course the villain of the piece : 



292 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

but the interest in his character to us lies 
in the fact that he reveals in its worst aspect 
the blending of two types, the aristocratic, 
with its pride and narrow exclusiveness, and 
the commercial, with its rapacious selfishness. 
In many respects the "Newcomes" is a tragedy, 
as is seen in Colonel Newcome's quarrel with 
Barnes and the tale of his ruin in the affair 
of Rummum Loll's Bundlecund Bank, and 
the motive is the struggle for wealth by one 
of a class whose first object ought to have 
been honour and to whom money should have 
been always a secondary consideration. 

Let us however turn now to lighter themes. 
One of Thackeray's most delightful char- 
acters is the old Countess of Kew, the sister 
of the late Marquis of Steyne and the grand- 
mother of Lord Kew and Ethel Newcome. 
The old lady frankly, and with a cynicism 
worthy of her brother, accepts the new order. 
She marries her daughter, Lady Ann, to Sir 
Brian Newcome, with complete disregard of 



LECTURE VII 293 

the young lady's preference for her cousin, 
Tom Poyntz. "Sir Brian Newcome," she 
would say, "is one of the most stupid and 
respectable of men ; Ann is clever but has 
not a grain of common sense. They make a 
very well assorted couple. Her flightiness 
would have driven any man crazy who had 
an opinion of his own. She would have 
ruined any poor man of her own rank. As 
it is I have given her a husband exactly 
suited to her. He pays the bills, does not 
see how absurd she is, keeps order in the 
establishment and checks her follies. She 
wanted to marry her Cousin, Tom Poyntz, 
when they were both very young, and pro- 
posed to die of a broken heart ... a broken 
fiddlestick ! She would have ruined Tom 
Poyntz in a year, and has no more idea of 
the cost of a leg of mutton than I have of 
Algebra." Her ladyship was under no delu- 
sions as to the antiquity of her husband's 
family, the founder of which was a fashion- 



294 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

able doctor who had attended George III. 
She recognised that the great houses to which 
she belonged had had their day and was 
resolved to make the best she could out of 
the world she lived in. She had the brains 
and the character to make that world thor- 
oughly uncomfortable if it did not bow to 
her will, and with her the old order began 
to come to an end. "Was my grandfather a 
weaver ?" asks Ethel Newcome. Her answer 
is: "How should I know? And what on 
earth does it matter, my child ? Except the 
Gaunts, the Howards, and one or two more, 
there is no good blood in England. You are 
lucky in sharing some of mine. My poor 
Lord Kew's grandfather was an apothecary at 
Hampton Court, and founded the family by 
giving a dose of rhubarb to Queen Charlotte. 
As a rule nobody is of good family." 

Leaving the novels, we come to the Book 
of Snobs, where the storming of society is 
seen at a later stage. In Chapter VII on 



LECTURE VII 295 

"some respectable snobs" we have the rise 
of the noble family of de Mogyns. The 
first of this ancient race who appeared above 
the horizon in these degenerate days was 
a Mr. Muggins, banker, army contractor, 
smuggler, and general jobber, lent money to 
a R-y-1 P-rs-n-ge, and by way of payment 
was made a baronet. His son paid undue 
attention to Miss Flack at a county ball. 
Captain Flack, her father, offered the alter- 
native of a duel or marriage, in accordance 
with the custom of the Irish nation to which 
he belonged and of the age ; young Alured 
Smith Muggins preferred to marry the lady 
and on the death of his father became a 
baronet. The editor of Fluke's Peerage found 
him a pedigree. The family was really 
founded by the patriarch Shem, whose grand- 
son began to draw up its pedigree on a papyrus 
scroll now in the possession of the family. 
In the days of Boadicea, Hogyn Mogyn of 
the hundred beeves aspired to marry that 



296 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

warlike princess. Whether he wooed and 
also won is not stated, but he married some- 
one and became the ancestor of Mogyn of 
the golden harp, the black fiend son of Mogyn, 
ancestor of the princes of Pontydwdlm. These 
succumbed to the English Kings ; but their 
representative David Gam de Mogins fought 
bravely at Agincourt and from him Sir 
Thomas Muggins was descended. 

This sounds a mere satire. I turn to 
Burke's Peerage 1895. I find that the son 
of a famous contractor, whose father was 
celebrated for having begun as a navvy 
and ended as a millionaire many times over, 
sprang from a very ancient Norman family 
which became obscure in 1603 and rose 
again to fame two centuries later. I notice 
that a brewer now a baron, whose beer had 
a world-wide fame, was the scion of a noble 
house, the first of whom was Gamellus who 
flourished when Henry Beauclerc ruled the 
land from 1100 to 1134. 



LECTURE VII 297 

One of the ladies of this famous family- 
was christened by the delightful but unusual 
name of Temperance, but this was in the 
reign of Charles I before the brewery was 
established. Are not such pedigrees as ri- 
diculous as any fiction of the brain ? But 
how much is it to be regretted that the 
writers of our peerages do not study the 
Book of Snobs. They would at least avoid 
parodying it at the order of their ennobled 
patrons. Disraeli, like Thackeray, exposed 
this business in his novel " Sybil, or the Two 
Nations." 

I need not say, however, that it was not 
because of their descent from the great 
Hogyn Mogyn that the de Mogyns got 
into society. They pushed, they schemed, 
they suffered rebuffs undaunted, and at last 
they won the coveted reward. Lady de 
Mogyns cut her friends as she ascended, and 
at last became a recognised power in the 
great world. 



298 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

The day had scarcely dawned when Thack- 
eray died, when instead of wealth's striving 
to win a place in society, society sought to 
obtain the recognition of the very rich. His 
satire had not to expend itself on aristocrats 
who hastened to abase themselves before the 
millionaire, and snobbery changed from a 
worship of rank to a worship of wealth. Our 
author has often been criticised for his abuse 
of the nobility. It has been said that it 
was prompted by envy. I venture to doubt 
this. To be as great a satirist as he, a man 
must feel deeply and have a saeva indignatio 
against a great evil. This, like all his prede- 
cessors, Thackeray had. He saw the hard- 
ness that the spirit of his age engendered. 

In all Thackeray's novels and writings we 
see how ashamed the new aristocracy was 
of the trades and businesses by which they 
made their money and how contemptuous 
the real aristocracy was of ennobled trade. 
Lord Steyne sneers at the idea of his son's 



LECTURE VII 299 

wife being a banker's daughter. The New- 
comes conveniently forget the weaver from 
which they sprang. We are sneeringly re- 
minded that Mr. Wenham's father was a 
coal merchant ; Major Pendennis conven- 
iently forgets that his brother was a mere 
apothecary. But this was not part of the 
old tradition of England. A very little 
time before people of high birth felt no shame 
in being in trade. The Nelsons are as good 
a family as any, yet Nelson himself served 
as a common sailor before the mast, and his 
near relatives kept shops in small towns. 
Let me read you a passage from a recently 
published book on Wordsworth : 

" Dorothy Wordsworth . . . lived first with 
her maternal grand-parents, and was not 
happy with them. She loved an open-air 
life, and was held closely indoors — serving 
in fact in a mercer's shop which they kept. 
. . . In 1788 a change came, for she went 
to live with her uncle at Forncett Rectory 



300 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

near Norwich. The Rector was also a Canon 
of Windsor, and in the Summer of 1792 . . . 
Dorothy was meeting King George III and 
his family — the princesses at least . . . and 
going to races and balls." 

Trade was no bar to good society till it 
was able to buy it and there was a great 
mingling of classes now rigidly separated. 
This feeling of shame for having practised 
some perfectly reputable calling has had I 
believe very serious results. It has made 
for the separation of employers and employed. 
It has caused people to take less pride in 
integrity and thoroughness and made them 
desirous of amassing wealth in order to enjoy 
ease. It has tended to make those of the 
second generation more desirous to pose as 
nobles than to follow the calling of their 
fathers. It has destroyed a commercial aris- 
tocracy and has put a plutocracy in its place. 
It tended for a time to substitute prudery 
and respectability for real Christianity ; and, 



LECTURE VII 301 

before the war at least, even these poor sub- 
stitutes were growing so out of fashion as to 
be regretted. It has also deepened the rift 
between classes. Between the old nobility 
and the poor there was a certain sympathy. 
The humbler class appreciated the fact that 
their rulers were gentlemen, they liked their 
courage, their courtesy, they did not even 
object to being ordered by them, their very 
vices were comprehensible. But they have 
never had any fellow feeling with a plutoc- 
racy ; with their present pay-masters they 
have been more impatient than with their 
former rulers ; and the difficulties of the 
present age are in no small degree due to 
the snobbery which Thackeray denounced. 



LECTURE VIII 
Sport, and Rural England 

I hope you will pardon the flippancy of 
the subject I am about to introduce ; but 
I may say that it is not possible to under- 
stand English life without studying it. 
Though we are getting close to our own 
times, yet it is evident that society has un- 
dergone an almost complete change since the 
scenes were depicted in the works I am using 
to-day. Surtees caught the exact moment 
when the change was coming ; and the old 
order was awaiting the signal to quit the 
world. In the rural England of the ' forties ' 
and ' fifties/ when the railway was just 
beginning to invade the countryside, the 
hunting field was still a national play- 
ground where neighbours met, the county 

302 



LECTURE VIII 303 

family still the pivot round which rural life 
moved. But everywhere are signs of the 
coming change. The nouveau riche was buy- 
ing the old estates, and the Jewish magnate 
beginning to make his appearance ; but 
the fabric of county society remained as yet 
unshaken. I can myself remember the gulf 
that parted socially the county from the 
town, the landed gentry from the professional 
classes, when the ownership of land was 
far more important than the possession of 
wealth. 

I propose to treat my subject from two 
aspects. First I shall take the so-called 
sporting novels, which are in themselves 
a literature, though I mean to confine my- 
self practically to a single author ; and, after 
having touched on this subject, I shall 
ask you to notice how Anthony Trollope, 
a writer sometimes tedious, but always ob- 
servant and often witty, deals with the 
hierarchy, clerical and lay, of county society. 



304 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

When St. Thomas a Becket was escaping 
from his enemies in England, he travelled 
through Flanders in humble disguise. Once, 
however, he nearly betrayed himself by stop- 
ping and admiring a beautiful falcon. Such 
discrimination raised the suspicion that the 
traveller was not a mere peasant or itinerant 
merchant, but an English gentleman of rank. 
However, the archbishop managed to escape 
detection and passed on. This little incident, 
however, shows that, even in the twelfth 
century, an expert knowledge of sport was 
deemed to be characteristic of gentility, and 
Becket, who had spent his early days in the 
king's court, instinctively looked with interest 
on a good bird. Four centuries later a very 
different archbishop of Canterbury, though 
he too died a martyr's death, was known as 
an excellent rider. Thomas Cranmer, the 
son of a country squire, was, we are specially 
told, remarkable for the firm and easy way 
he sat his horse. Unlike Becket, Cranmer 



LECTURE VIII 305 

was bred a scholar ; but, in later days, he 
too would have been called a sportsman. 
About a century later another English 
primate distinguished himself less creditably 
in the field. George Abbott, the Puritan 
predecessor of Laud, was shooting deer ; 
and by pure accident killed a keeper ; for 
which an attempt was made to declare the 
see of Canterbury canonically vacant. It 
is much the same with less exalted ecclesi- 
astics. In the middle ages the clergy of 
England were honourably distinguished for 
their morality as compared with their con- 
tinental brethren. Their besetting sin was 
that nothing could restrain them from hunt- 
ing. The "hunting" abbot of the middle 
ages was succeeded by the " hunting parson" 
of later days. Thackeray's description of 
the Rev. Bute Crawley would, mutatis mu- 
tandis, apply to many an English clergyman, 
from the earliest times down to our own 
days. 



306 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

"A tall, stately, jolly, shovel-hatted man. 
. . . You might see his bay mare a score 
of miles away from the Rectory house when- 
ever there was a dinner party. ... He 
rode to hounds in a pepper-and-salt frock, 
and was one of the best fishermen in the 
county." 

It is hardly necessary to dilate upon the 
sporting vocabulary of Shakespeare ; or to 
point out that the correct use of hunting and 
shooting and hawking terms was considered 
as test of a man's gentility — nor need I 
appeal to the severity of the old Forest 
Laws and the more modern Game Laws, 
both of which were powerless to restrain the 
English peasants' inveterate propensity to 
sport. 

Little wonder is it, therefore, that there 
arose a veritable literature which revolved 
round the pivot of sport and especially that 
of hunting. 

I need hardly say that the conditions of 



LECTURE VIII 307 

the pursuit of game changed with the state 
of the country. In the middle ages the greater 
part of England was wooded. The green- 
wood was the home of the outlaw ; and it 
was said that a squirrel could cross England 
without touching the ground. The chase 
was therefore pursued in glades and thickets ; 
and could never have been a very rapid 
affair. What riding was done in the open 
country was connected with hawking — a 
very favourite pastime. Gradually, as the 
country became more open and the forests 
disappeared, the fox, which our ancestors 
regarded as vermin, began to be looked upon 
as a sacred animal, because of the excellent 
runs he gave. For a long time the hunting 
was slow and its arrangements very primi- 
tive ; those who joined in it being the squire, 
his friends, and his dependants ; but gradu- 
ally the crack riders began to gather from all 
parts to where the best hunting was to be 
had ; and Leicestershire became the chief 



308 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

centre. Fashionable hunting, as opposed to 
the rural and purely local sport, seems to 
have begun at the time of the Regency in 
the days of the " dandies " ; and I have a 
recollection of an oft-quoted description by 
"Nimrod" of the way in which a stranger 
was gradually recognised and welcomed when 
he came among the hunting fraternity at 
Melton Mowbray. But it is my intention 
to speak of a later period when hunting had 
become a sport in which men, who had no 
connection with the locality, came down 
from London to take part. In olden days 
the town sportsman was a theme of constant 
derision. John Gilpin's ride, and Mr. Win- 
kle's difficulties with his horse, were typi- 
cal stories. The caricaturists were never 
tired of depicting the quaint and somewhat 
dangerous antics of the Londoner with a shot- 
gun, and jokes at his ignorance of all sports 
were the stock in trade of the humourist. 
Gradually however these began to fall flat. 



LECTURE VIII 309 

As the country became accessible, first by 
good roads, and then by railways, men from 
London joined in its pastimes, and proved 
themselves anything but ridiculous where 
horse and gun were concerned. 

"Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour" is valuable 
for our purpose because it illustrates so many 
sides of English country life. The hero is 
a somewhat shady adventurer who spends 
half the year in hunting and the rest in talk- 
ing about it, and is famed for being a guest 
whom, once you get into your house, it is 
impossible to eject. He hires his hunters, 
and sells them if he can at a profit ; and, as 
he can ride almost anything, he is able to 
show a vicious brute to the greatest advan- 
tage, sell him for a good sum, and then make 
a great favour of taking him back. He 
generally succeeds in getting invitations, 
partly because he is supposed to be a rich 
man, and also on account of a rumour, of 
which, to do him justice, he is unaware, 



310 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

that he is able to give people, anxious for 
notoriety, a good notice in the newspapers. 

One can almost smell the English country 
in winter time as one reads the book and 
in imagination plough one's way, as the dusk 
draws on, through the muddy lanes on a tired 
horse after a long run, which has left one 
several miles from home with the short 
winter day closing rapidly. Or, one can feel 
the exhilaration which the sight of a fox gives 
when he goes away with the hounds at his 
heels, apparently their certain prey, and 
then vanishes as he slips through the next 
fence, not to be caught, if caught at all, for 
many a long mile. 

The author's description of the different 
houses visited by Mr. Sponge in his tour 
gives no bad idea of rural life and sport in 
the "fifties." The first house which Mr. 
Sponge honours is Jawleyford Court, inhabited 
by Mr. Jawleyford, a gentleman of good lin- 
eage, but only moderate means, on which he 



LECTURE VIII 311 

manages to make an appearance of living 
in great state. Jawleyford, as his name 
implies, is a pretentious fellow, apparently 
hearty and hospitable, but very deceptive 
to those who come in close contact with him. 
He poses as a man of culture and refinement, 
and also as an ardent devotee of the chase. 
Sponge cares for only one thing on earth, 
and that is hunting ; and he is emphatically 
a man of one book, namely, a work on London 
cab fares by a certain Mogg — whether the 
title is an invention or not, I do not know. 
When Mr. Sponge has nothing better to do, 
he takes this work and studies imaginary 
drives about London, amusing himself by 
calculating the price of each. One can imag- 
ine how this ill-assorted couple — Sponge, 
who cared for nothing but hunting, and Jaw- 
leyford, who liked to pose as a man of cul- 
ture and refinement — got on together. But 
Mrs. Jawleyford was impressed with the 
idea that Sponge was a man of wealth and 



312 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

was a most eligible suitor for one of her 
pretty daughters. Consequently she re- 
ceived her guest with much hospitality, and 
gave him a hearty welcome. The first day 
was unsuitable for hunting ; and Sponge had 
to amuse himself in the house with his host, 
who conducted him over his picture gallery, 
and was intensely disgusted when Sponge 
failed to recognise the bust of Jawleyford, 
which was considered a speaking likeness. 

The next day, however, Sponge, totally 
disregarding the enchanting Miss Jawley- 
fords, started, before breakfast, to a meet of 
the hounds. We are now introduced to a 
great county magnate, who is believed to be 
a caricature of a noble sportsman, well known 
in his day — the Earl of Scamperdale. He 
had been kept very short by his father, the 
previous earl ; and, as Viscount Hardup, had 
acquired very penurious habits, which clave 
to him after his accession to fortune. Hunt- 
ing was his only expensive taste : and on 



LECTURE VIII 313 

this he spared no necessary outlay. He was 
always well mounted and his hounds admi- 
rably chosen ; but he would do almost any- 
thing sooner than take his horses through a 
turnpike gate. He lived in a sort of back 
room in his splendid house ; and his food was 
of the coarsest description. His only com- 
panion was a Mr. Jack Spraggon, who was 
exactly like him in appearance, rode well, and 
was quite content to fare like his lordship, 
if he could get nothing better. This well- 
assorted couple between them possessed a 
fine flow of language, though Lord Scamper- 
dale always said that people presumed on 
him because he was "a lord and could not 
swear nor use coarse language " ; and they 
contrived to keep the field fairly select, by 
driving intruders away by their powers of 
satire and abuse. Now Sponge was a first- 
rate horseman, but could only afford mounts 
which were unsound or vicious. His horse, 
"Multum in Parvo," was the latter. In 



3H SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

appearance he was a low long-backed beast, 
splendidly made, and as a rule was a docile 
and tractable creature ; but if he took it into 
his head to bolt, he did so with great deter- 
mination and no power on earth could stop 
him. Directly the horse saw Lord Scam- 
perdale's hounds, this propensity asserted it- 
self ; and he carried his rider into the midst 
of the pack, scattering them like sheep and 
maiming several. Then the floodgates of 
the Earl's copious vocabulary were opened 
and poor Sponge was assailed, first by him 
and, when he sank back exhausted into his 
saddle, by Jack Spraggon. If I recollect 
aright, the latter on this or some other oc- 
casion called Sponge a " sanctified, putre- 
fied, methodistical, puseyite pig-jobber,'' for 
Surtees is very careful to put no real bad 
language into the mouth of his characters. 
From this time forward Lord Scamperdale 
takes a violent dislike to Sponge and plots with 
all his might to get rid of him. His determi- 



LECTURE VIII 315 

nation is increased when on another occasion 
Sponge's horse bolts, not this time into the 
hounds, but into the Earl himself and knocks 
him off sprawling on the ground. The 
story, however, is useful to our purpose 
because it reveals the different types of 
country life, and the graduated hierarchy 
of its society. The Earl of Scamperdale is, 
of course, a caricature ; but with all his 
boorishness and eccentricity, he is quite 
conscious that, as a nobleman, he is a great 
personage. His hounds are not a subscrip- 
tion pack, but are supported entirely at 
his own expense ; and his bad language to 
strangers has at least the advantage of keep- 
ing his field small and select for the benefit of 
the residents in his neighbourhood, who put 
up with his eccentricities partly because they 
really regard his rank and position ; and also 
because his lordship shows them the best of 
sport. Jawleyford, whose daughter Scam- 
perdale ultimately married, represents the 



316 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

country squire, not well off but pretentious, 
keeping up a sort of pinchbeck dignity, yet 
a member of the hierarchy of which the peer 
was also a member, though more highly 
placed. 

Less reputable, but of the same order, is 
Sir Harry Scattercash, of Non-Such Hall, 
on whom Sponge inflicts himself after he has 
been driven out of the Flat Hat hunt, as 
Lord Scamperdale's pack was named. Sir 
Harry is a young man, who has come unex- 
pectedly into his title and estate after marry- 
ing an actress ; and he is engaged in drink- 
ing himself to death and dissipating his 
money. His house is full of his wife's theatri- 
cal friends, who make themselves thoroughly 
at home, and Sir Harry has apparently 
inherited a pack of hounds, managed on a 
very different system to that adopted by 
Scamperdale, whose motto is efficiency with 
economy. Sponge, who, with all his vul- 
garity, is a first-rate sportsman, takes this 



LECTURE VIII 317 

motley pack in hand and makes even Sir 
Harry's hounds kill their fox in fine style. 
In fact, on one occasion, when he has out- 
distanced the mixed field which attended 
the baronet's meets, he actually changes 
foxes with Lord Scamperdale, and a fine 
scene ensues in which Mr. Spraggon sur- 
passes himself in the variety of his language. 
Not that two such adventurers as Sponge 
and Spraggon are real enemies ; and they 
meet on neutral ground in the house of a 
third type of Squire. Mr. Puffington, the 
son of a wealthy manufacturer, has bought 
an estate and set up a pack of hounds. The 
delineation of this character is extremely 
clever ; and shows how the author realises 
the change which is coming over country 
life. Scamperdale, Jawleyford, and Sir Harry 
all belong to the old landed aristocracy. 
Puffington is a new man. His money is in 
the land like theirs ; but he is independent 
of his estate. In his desire to be popular 



318 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

he allows his tenants to rob him and his 
labourers to poach his game. He main- 
tains a pack of foxhounds, and entertains 
magnificently. But he is not really liked, 
and is regarded as an interloper. Think- 
ing Sponge is a literary man and that he will 
trumpet the fame of his pack in the news- 
papers, Puffington invites him to stay in his 
house and entertains him royally. 

Jack Spraggon is also one of the invited 
guests ; and Sponge lends him one of his 
horses. They have a famous run with the 
hounds ; and when they get home, in the 
interval before dinner, Spraggon tells Sponge 
that Pufrlngton, their host, expects to have 
a flaming account of his hunt in the news- 
papers ; and that their reception is due to 
the fact that Sponge is believed to be a great 
writer on sporting subjects. As, however, 
he does not know how to do it, Spraggon 
offers to dictate an account of the run ; and 
Sponge settles down at the table, having 



LECTURE VIII 319 

used his friend's razor to cut the pen. The 
run is described in true journalistic style ; 
and, when Sponge, who is an indifferent 
penman, exclaims "Hard work authorship," 
Jack Spraggon says that he could go on for 
ever. Sponge retorts, " It's all very well for 
you to do the talking, but it's the 'writing' 
and the craning and the spelling." However, 
the manuscript is sent off to the local paper, 
and falls into the hands of a daughter of the 
proprietor. As she cannot make head or 
tail to Sponge's writing, she edits it as best 
she can, calling " a ravishing scent " an 
exquisite perfume ; and making the run not 
less than ten miles " as the cow goes " instead 
of as the " crow flies." 

That evening there is a grander banquet 
than ever ; and Spraggon and Sponge get 
hold of a rich young fellow, a Mr. Pacey. 
Spraggon persuades Pacey, who fancies him- 
self a very sharp blade indeed, that Sponge 
is a greenhorn, with the result that at the 



320 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

end of the dinner he buys Sponge's horse, 
Multum in Parvo, at a very low figure. As, 
however, that famous quadruped manages 
to throw Mr. Pacey, and also his guardian 
Major Screw, Sponge gets the horse back 
with a sum of money as a compensation for 
the inconvenience to which he has been 
put, and generously gives Mr. Pacey a bit 
of valuable advice : never to try to, trade in 
horses after dinner ! Naturally Mr. Puffing- 
ton is not pleased by all this, and when he 
reads the account of the run with his hounds 
he nearly has a fit ; and he resolves to take 
to his bed till Sponge is well out of his house. 
Here we take farewell of our hero ; and I 
will say a few words on the way in which 
Surtees, in his sketches of country life, indi- 
cates his appreciation that a change is com- 
ing over the land. The Scamperdales, Jaw- 
leyfords, and the older families are disappear- 
ing and the new commercial and moneyed 
class is taking its place. Puffington and 



LECTURE VIII 321 

men of his type are beginning to come to 
the front. It is getting more difficult to 
live on the land, as the older gentry had 
done ; and estates are becoming rather a 
tax on a commercial fortune than the sup- 
port of an aristocratic family. Surtees repre- 
sents the old landowners as somewhat out 
at elbows, trying in vain to compete with 
the new men who are buying up their estates. 
In one of his novels we have a great Jewish 
magnate, Sir Moses Mainchance, who would 
have been practically impossible twenty years 
earlier. Sport changes with society. The 
railway has made country and town one, 
as a few hours bring all England within 
reach of London. Hunting is ceasing to be 
the old friendly and almost family institu- 
tion, where the neighbourhood gathered at 
the meet, and everybody was known and 
welcomed. It was already becoming an affair 
for the rich from all parts of the world ; and 
the Scamperdales in vain tried to scare 



322 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

away the wealthy sportsman of the town by 
abusive language. The time was close at 
hand when his presence would be welcomed 
eagerly ; and rural sport would be at an end. 

We will now turn to another side of country 
life — namely, the social as portrayed by 
Anthony Trollope, who might also have 
been quoted as a writer on sport. Trol- 
lope, to my mind, has a real genius for 
interesting his readers in uninteresting people ; 
because he describes so faithfully the charac- 
ters one meets every day, gives their conversa- 
tion exactly as they talked to one another, 
and exhibits them in the same commonplace 
attitude, in which we all are for the greater 
part of our lives. He wrote not by inspira- 
tion, when he felt in the mood, but regularly 
and systematically, turning out his novels, 
when he had leisure from his duties as a gov- 
ernment official, at so many pages an hour. 
He says that he had little or no intimate 



LECTURE VIII 323 

knowledge of cathedral society ; yet, to one 
who has opportunity of observing it some- 
what closely, his descriptions appear to have 
the accuracy of a photograph. 

In Trollope's novels we have English life, 
especially well drawn ; and though many 
scenes are laid in London, his characters 
always gravitate back to the country whence 
they derive their influence and prestige. 
It is not my intention to elaborate more 
than one side of this very versatile and 
copious writer. His political novels, for 
example, are well worth studying, especially 
"Phineas Finn." In "The Bertrams" we 
have an excellent picture of Oxford life in 
the opening chapter. Personal experience 
gave Trollope unusual insight into the char- 
acters of the government officials of his 
time. He was wonderfully quick at seizing 
on types hitherto unknown in English so- 
ciety who were gradually becoming forces 
in the world. Even as a writer on sport 



324 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

he deserves a place. For what can be better 
than his description of the young, popular, able 
clergyman in " Framley Parsonage," whose 
very success leads him into some very difficult 
situations ? I need not remind you, for I 
find he is widely read in this country, of his 
treatment of social gatherings in great houses 
like that of the Duke of Omniun. All I 
intend to do is to ask you to examine his 
clerical types and, perhaps, to offer some 
explanations which may be useful. 

The state of things we read of in such books 
as "The Warden" and " Barchester Towers " 
has almost, but not quite, disappeared, and I 
confess that, although I think I understand 
it, I find a difficulty in making it clear to 
you. The initial problem is to explain why 
life in a cathedral city is often rural rather 
than town life. In the first place the word 
"city" in England used to be applied only to 
places where there was a cathedral. Ely, 
though still a town of some 8000 people, is al- 



LECTURE VIII 325 

ways spoken of as a "city" and so are Llandaff 
and St. David's, which are little more than 
villages ; and, till very recently, Liverpool and 
Birmingham were styled "towns." Leices- 
ter, with some 300,000 inhabitants, is still, 
I believe, technically a "town." The older 
cathedrals are in fact generally in small places 
which were once very important "cities," 
but have been outstripped by what then 
were little better than hamlets, but have 
long since become great centres of popula- 
tion. Such are Canterbury, Chichester, Salis- 
bury, Wells, Ely, and Lichfield. Barchester 
was emphatically a country town, dominated 
by the landowners in the vicinity ; and the 
clergy around it were a rural priesthood. The 
society which was centred in any cathedral 
was and still is unlike anything else in the 
world. In the middle ages a great cathedral, 
like Salisbury or Lincoln, was designed for 
a semi-monastic rather than congregational 
worship. It was served by a community of 



326 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

priests, called " canons " because they observed 
a "canon," or rule of life. Joined with these 
was a veritable army of inferior priests, 
singers and ministers, all under the control 
of the dean, who presided over the cathedral, 
as the bishop over the diocese. This vast 
and splendid establishment was, at the Ref- 
ormation under Queen Elizabeth, reduced 
to a limited number of canons, or preb- 
endaries, minor canons, singing men and 
boys, vergers and bedesmen. As, however, 
under the new regime the services were little 
more than daily morning and evening prayer, 
the reduced staff had little or nothing to do. 
Accordingly the canons took turns to reside 
in the cathedral close and usually held 
benefices in other places. They married like 
other clergy ; but were still, nominally, mo- 
nastic persons attached to the cathedral. 
As time went on the estates of the chapters 
or colleges of the deans and canons became 
very valuable ; and their positions were much 



LECTURE VIII 327 

coveted as the prizes of the church. A 
cathedral chapter therefore was, as a rule, 
an aristocratic body, consisting of the dean 
nominated by the crown, and the canons, 
as a rule, by the bishop. Of course the 
bishops, in days when public opinion was not 
powerful, put their relatives into the canon- 
ries ; and there were many ties between 
the various members of the cathedral bodies, 
who kept the rest of the world, and espe- 
cially the inferior clergy, at a respectful 
distance. 

With this attempt to explain the situation 
let me try to set forth some of the principal 
characters in "The Warden" and "Bar- 
chester Towers " ; remembering that men are 
living under an order of things which was be- 
ginning to pass away. 

First we have two charming characters in 
the Bishop and the Warden. Bishop Grant- 
ley is an aged man, a gentleman in the truest 
sense of the word ; but a prelate who had 



328 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

never perhaps in his life been particularly 
energetic, and was passing his later days in 
dignified ease. He is a little lonely, as very 
old men often are ; and he does not compre- 
hend the new age in which men have to fight 
to maintain their position and privileges ; 
so he fails to understand his energetic son, 
who has married the Warden's daughter. 
His one friend is the Warden, a man, younger 
than himself, though elderly. The Warden 
holds one of those anomalous positions not 
uncommon in the church at that time. He is 
head of a hospital for old men, in receipt of a 
very comfortable income of £800 ($4000) ; and 
he is also the precentor, that is, leader of the 
music in the cathedral. He is a modest 
retiring man, an exquisite musician, and a 
kindly friend to the old men under his charge. 
Very different is the Bishop's son, Archdeacon 
Grantley. The Archdeacon is a strong man, 
determined to stand up for his rights, and 
what he believes to be the rights of his church. 



LECTURE VIII 329 

He is thoroughly efficient, a vigorous adminis- 
trator, a capable ruler of the rich parish over 
which he presides. He cannot understand 
his father's allowing things to drift, nor the 
placid piety of his father-in-law, the Warden. 
The two old men are terribly worried, and 
when they dine together they plot feebly how 
to resist the Archdeacon, but give way when- 
ever he appears on the scene. But at last 
the crisis comes. The newspapers discover 
that the Warden is overpaid for his nominal 
work at the hospital, the old men, who are 
well lodged, fed, and cared for, are told that 
they ought to share in his stipend. A busy 
lawyer in the cathedral city takes up the case 
and the great London paper, the Thunderer, 
has leading articles denouncing the abuses 
of the church in general and the Warden's 
position in particular. Finally a novel ap- 
pears with a thinly veiled attack on the 
administration of the Barchester Hospital 
for old men. Then the Warden shows him- 



330 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

self to have all the firmness of a man, gentle 
by nature, but of the highest principles. 
He retires to a life of poverty rather than 
bear the reproach of being in a false position. 
The Archdeacon storms, accuses his father- 
in-law of culpable weakness in deserting his 
post, and the Bishop for allowing him to 
do so. And then the old Bishop rallies to 
his friend's support. Terribly afraid of his 
masterful son, he will not allow the Warden 
to be bullied out of doing what he thinks 
right. So the Warden leaves his comfort- 
able house and takes apartments in the city, 
the Bishop gives him a tiny parish ; and Mr. 
Harding, for that is the Warden's name, lives 
in honourable poverty, directing the cathedral 
music as precentor and ministering in his 
little church in the old city ; and he and his 
old friend, the Bishop, have peace in their 
latter days. Thus we pass from "The War- 
den" to "Barchester Towers," and find old 
Dr. Grantley dying peacefully and his son, 



LECTURE VIII 331 

the Archdeacon, hoping to succeed his father. 
Another man is, however, given the bishop- 
ric, and Trollope introduces his greatest 
characters, Bishop and Mrs. Proudie. The 
new Bishop is a fairly easy-going man, but 
his wife is determined to bring things in 
Barchester into order. Her regime has for 
its watchword efficiency. In it there is 
no room for kindly bishops and retiring 
scholars, like Mr. Harding. What is required 
is awakening preachers, zealous reformers, 
capable administrators. The old sleepy 
cathedral must become a centre of vigorous 
life and action, in which even clergy like 
Archdeacon Grantley, with their aristocratic 
notions, could have no place. Mrs. Proudie 
is herself a lady of high birth ; but vulgar 
people have a good deal of influence over 
her, because they flatter her vanity. Ac- 
cordingly she takes up with a clergyman 
named Slope, who lets her in for a good deal 
of trouble by his officiousness and want of 



332 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

judgment and good feeling. But who am 
I, that in a brief lecture I should attempt to 
describe Mrs. Proudie ? Let us turn to a 
very typical character in old cathedral life. 
Dr. Stanhope, one of the canons of Bar- 
chester, would be impossible now, but is 
easily conceived in the "fifties." I should 
say that he was the sort of man who had 
become a clergyman because his family 
was able to advance him ; and had never 
had any real vocation for his calling. His 
wife and children were a great expense to 
him ; and he had lived long abroad in order 
to retrench, getting his work done for him 
in England. His son was a thorough Bo- 
hemian, and his daughter had married an 
Italian nobleman, who had left her. Bishop 
Proudie had compelled Dr. Stanhope to return 
to his duties at Barchester ; and the family 
were thoroughly out of place in a cathedral 
city with their foreign ideals and lax views 
of propriety. You have to picture the 



LECTURE VIII 333 

decorous formality of Barchester society to 
realise the humour of Trollope's description 
of Bertie Stanhope and his sister the Signora. 
Throughout Trollope's novels there is the 
background of rural life ; and especially 
that of the clergy. At times it is amusing, 
but often it is tragic ; and, believe me, in 
those parsonage houses in the picturesque 
villages of England some veritable tragedies 
have been enacted. How many a clergyman 
and his wife have succumbed before the work 
of bringing up an enormous family on insuffi- 
cient means ! How many a man of high 
culture has found in the parish he entered 
with such high hopes the end of his career ! 
How many have dreariness and isolation led 
to find relief in habits which have proved their 
ruin ! The story of the rural clergy of Eng- 
land is the theme of many a novelist, from 
Fielding onwards ; and there is generally a 
tone of sadness about it. And may I com- 
mend especially the writings of Charlotte 



334 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

Young for perhaps the best description of 
the subject ? Side by side with the comfort- 
able dignitaries, who lived around the cathe- 
drals, — the Grantleys, the Proudies, the 
Stanhopes, — were the Quiverfuls, with the 
crushing load of children innumerable, and 
Mr. Crawley, a famous scholar in his day, 
who had sunk amid the poverty of a wretched 
parish and the weight of utterly uncongenial 
surroundings. 

One of the greatest changes in England 
that people of my age have seen is the 
complete shifting of influence from the 
country to the town. And this is pecul- 
iarly true of the clergy, who often belonged 
to the country families and shared in the 
ideas, tasks, and pursuits of their brothers. 
Now that our young clergy are recruited 
from a totally different class, they are per- 
haps more devoted to their profession but 
are unfortunately bred in towns rather than 
the country and often fail to understand the 



LECTURE VIII 335 

people in the way their predecessors had 
done. 

Even in my younger days the posses- 
sion of land meant power and social pres- 
tige ; and people really lived on it. But 
the change was coming rapidly ; and the 
writers I have quoted show us the scene 
just before it was about to shift. Among 
all classes there has been a rush from the 
country to the towns ; and there has been a 
growing tendency to regard rural England 
rather as a playground than as the source 
of the nation's best inhabitants. This tend- 
ency has unfortunately, in my judgment 
at least, been fostered by a legislation which 
has refused to give agriculture the encourage- 
ment it requires, with the result that our vil- 
lages in England almost all tell the same tale 
of falling population. Perhaps one of the 
most urgent problems before our English 
statesmen is how to attract people back to 
the beautiful country, which under modern 



336 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

economic conditions has been so much de- 
serted. 

I have now brought my lectures to an end. 
I have tried to place before you as vivid a 
picture as I could of English life in a by- 
gone age ; and if I have not made it adequate 
to the expectation of my auditors, I have 
at least a hope that I have aroused sufficient 
interest to make some here desire to know 
more of the subject. For the study of 
social life is, in truth, a most important 
branch of history. It is almost impossible 
to form a just conception of the men of any 
age from documents unless one can gain an 
idea what manner of men they really are. 
Unless we have this knowledge, no amount 
of research, no ingenuity or discrimination 
will assist us to arrive at an apprehension of 
the truth. For it is not possible to under- 
stand men's actions unless we have that 
sympathy which makes us realise that under 
different conditions they were human beings 



LECTURE VIII 337 

not, after all, unlike what we ourselves should 
have been in their circumstances. And it 
is in the novel, the private letter, the carica- 
ture, the half-forgotten jest or good story, 
that we are helped to depict the men and 
women of the past. 

A pleasing task awaits me ; namely, to 
thank you for the welcome you have given 
me as a stranger, when I first appeared 
before you, for the patience you have shown 
in listening to what I had to say, for the evi- 
dent sympathy and good feeling you have 
shown throughout these lectures. Let me 
say that I felt deeply the honour conferred 
on me by the offer of a Lowell lectureship, 
that I enjoyed, in these days of great sorrow 
and anxiety shared by all my countrymen, 
the distraction which I found in preparing 
for my responsible task ; and that though, 
I confess, I first entered this room with 
no little trepidation and wondered how I 
could possibly interest complete strangers, 



338 SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 

I now feel that I am speaking to friends, 
who have, by their kindness to an English- 
man with whose very name they must have 
been unfamiliar, demonstrated the reality 
of the ties which bind the two Englands, the 
old and the new, each to the other. 



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emulate the literary world of Paris by bringing men of 
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University of Missouri, Columbia, Mo. 



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Cloth, i2tno, $1.73 

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Representative English Comedies, Vol. I 

FROM THE BEGINNINGS TO SHAKESPEARE 

With introductory essays and notes. An historical view of our earlier comedy 
and other monographs by various writers under the general editorship of 

CHARLES MILLS GAYLEY, Litt.D., LL.D., 
Professor of the English Language and Literature in the University of California 

Cloth, 8vo, 686 pages, $2.00 

The aim of this volume and those which will follow is to indicate the de- 
velopment of a literary type by a selection of its representative specimens, 
arranged in the order of their production and accompanied by critical and 
historical studies. So little has been scientifically determined concerning 
evolution or permutation in literature that the more specific the field of in- 
quiry, the more trustworthy are the results attained, — hence the limita- 
tion of this research not merely to a genus like the drama, but to one of 
its species. What is here presented to the public differs from histories of 
the drama in that it is more restricted in scope and that it substantiates 
the narrative of a literary growth by reproducing the data necessary to an 
induction; it differs from editions of individual plays and dramatists, on 
the other hand, because it attempts to concatenate its text by a running 
commentary upon the characteristics of the species under consideration as 
they successively appear. It is an illustrated, if not certified, history of 
English comedy. 

CONTENTS 

I. An Historical View of the Beginnings of the English Comedy. By 
Charles Mills Gayley. 
II. John Heywood: Critical Essay. By Alfred W. Pollard. 
Edition of the Play of the Wether. The same. 
Edition of a Mery Play between Johan Johan, Tyb. The same. 

III. Nicholas Udall: Critical Essay. By Ewald Fliigel. 

Edition of Roister Doister. The same. 
Appendix on Various Matters. The same. 

IV. William Stevenson: Critical Essay. By Henry Bradley. 

Edition of Gammer Gurton's Nedle. The same. 
Appendix. The same. 
V. John Lyly: Critical Essay. By George P. Baker. 
Edition of Alexander and Catnpaspe. The same. 
VI. George Peele: Critical Essay. By F. B. Gummere. 
Edition of The Old Wives' Tale. The same. 
Appendix. The same. 
VII. Greene's Place in Comedy: A Monograph. By G. E. Woodberry. 
VIII. Robert Greene: His Life, and the Order of His Plays. By Charles 
Mills Gayley. 
Edition of the Honourable Historie of Frier Bacon. The same. 
Appendix on Greene's Versification. The same. 
IX. Henry Porter: Critical Essay. By Charles Mills Gayley. 
Edition of The Two Angry Women of Abington. The same. 
X. Shakespeare as a Comic Dramatist. By Edward Dowden. 
Index. 



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Representative English Comedies, VoL II 

THE LATER CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
BEN JONSON AND OTHERS 

With introductory essays and notes and a comparative view of the fellows and 
followers of Shakespeare under the general editorship of 

CHARLES MILLS GAYLEY, Litt.D., LL.D., 
Professor of the English Language and Literature in the University of California 

Cloth, 8vo, 586 pages, $2.00 

In this volume are included a number of the plays of Ben 
Jonson and the best play of several of his contemporaries. 
Each of these has been edited by a scholar of unquestioned 
standing, and is accompanied by an introductory critical and 
historical essay. Furthermore, Professor Gayley, the general 
editor, has included a most scholarly introduction in the 
form of an essay entitled " A Comparative View of the Fel- 
lows and Followers of Shakespeare in Comedy." 

CONTENTS 

I. A Comparative View of the Fellows and Followers of Shakespeare. 
(Part One.) By Charles Mills Gayley. 
II. Ben Jonson: Critical Essay. By Charles H. Herford. 
Edition of Every Man in His Humour. The same. 
III. Ben Jonson: Critical Essay. By Charles Mills Gayley. 

Edition of Efiiccene, or the Silent Woman. The same. 
IV. Ben Jonson. The Alchemist: Critical Essay. By George A. Smithson. 

Edition of The A Ichemist. The same. 
V. Chapman, Jonson, and Marston. Eastward Hoe: Critical Essay. By 
John W. Cuncliffe. 
Edition of East-ward Hoe. The same. 
VI. The Merry Devill of Edmonton: Critical Essay. By John Matthews 
Manly. 
Edition of The Merry Devill of Edmonton. The same. 
Index. 



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Representative English Comedies, Vol. Ill 

THE LATER CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 

FLETCHER AND OTHERS 

With introductory essays and notes and a comparative view of the 
fellows and followers of Skakespeare under the general editor- 
ship of 

CHARLES MILLS GAYLEY, Litt.D., LL.D., 

Professor of the English Language and Literature in the University of California 

Cloth, 8vo, 66 J pages, $2.00 

This volume, like the second one of this series, con- 
tains plays of the later contemporaries of Shakespeare. 
The editors of the different plays are scholars of wide 
reputation who have made a special study of the period 
and the various dramatists here represented. In this 
volume Professor Gayley's masterly essay on " The Fel- 
lows and Followers of Shakespeare " is brought to a 
close. 

CONTENTS 

I. A Comparative View of the Fellows and Followers of Shakespeare in 
Comedy. (Part Two.) By Charles Mills Gayley. 
II. Thomas Dekker: Critical Essay. By Alexis F. Lange. 
Edition of The Shomakers Holiday. The same. 

III. Middleton and Rowley. The Spanish Gipsie : Critical Essay. The late 

H. Butler Clarke. 
Edition of The Spanish Gipsie. The same. 

IV. John Fletcher. Rule a Wife and Have a Wife : Critical Essay. George 

Saintsbury. 
Edition of Rule a Wife and Have a Wife. The same. 
V. Philip Massinger: Critical Essay. Brander Matthews. 
Edition of A New Way to Pay Old Debts. The same. 
VI. Richard Brome : Critical Essay. G. P. Baker. 

Edition of The Antipodes. The same. 
VII. James Shirley : Critical Essay. Sir A. W. Ward. 

Edition of The Royall Master. The same. 
Index. 



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